Introduction

Have you ever felt like traditional occult practices and systems are too limiting or dogmatic? Dr. Peter Duchemin’s “Meta Magick” offers a refreshing alternative – a harmonizing synthesis of various magical traditions, myths, and scientific principles into an open, modular framework. Meta Magick breaks free from the constraints of specific occult systems, aiming to create a universal method that operates at the forefront of our world-making capacities. If you’re ready to explore an innovative, integrative approach to magical practices, this blog post will provide a down-to-earth introduction to the key concepts and techniques of Dr. Duchemin’s revolutionary Meta Magick.

If you have not already read his first interview then I recommend doing so, it is a good primer for this even bigger interview, see it here:

Metamagick: An interview with Dr. Peter Duchemin

See his website here.

Podcast: Peter and Perseus Arcane Academy

Podcast: Peter and Clint Sabom

Before we start I just want to say that having met Peter and also being in the fortunate position to see many different methods. His Meta Magick is GOLD – It may take a bit of time to develop eyes and ears to the method, but when you do, ALOT of things open up. Not only that, but Peter as a person only wants the best for people who work with him – this is important. – Perseus Arcane Academy.

PAA: Can you explain in simple terms what Meta Magick is and what makes it different from traditional magick?

Meta magick involves viewing magickal systems as “suites” of transformational pressures that are brought to bear on eternity as humans experience and express it. If traditional magickal systems are like islands of stability generated by humans in relation to chaos, and at the same time, those systems are viewed as “truths” discovered and practiced by the adept, then meta magick instead sees an open archipelago of such “truth-giving” systems, and seeks to establish commerce across them. It is inclusive of all magickal systems on principle, and puts them to play alongside one another within an immanent field in which they are all operative and interactive.

Meta magickians seek to experiment with hybridizations, combinations, and syntheses that might arise from such an ideology-neutral field. At the same time, the practice is more than just philosophical relativism. The meta magickian recognizes that all systems are “wholly (and not just subjectively) true” in their own nature, and that the immanent field is not a “greater truth”, but rather, something like a basin – or “common truth” in which all magicks play. Some aspects of the traditional systems prove themselves to be unviable in this arrangement – and get selected out. Other aspects come to the fore, and shine. The meta magickian uses ideologically neutral methods of study to explore what each system contributes, and how, and notes also where different systems overlap, and where they diverge. Through this alchemical process, we discover the real value of these world pictures and we also transcend the pathological elements that can accrete over time, such as dogmatism, xenophobia, and literalism. Meta magick is a kind of science, even as it is wholly made of art. 

“Meta” generally implies that the subject is being treated from an adjunct dimension – hence, for example, “meta-language” is a technical language that treats language itself as the subject, or, as another example: the “meta-analysis” of power conducted by Michel Foucault which treated power itself as the subject and discovered how it reproduces itself in institutions such as schools, hospitals, and prisons. There is implied a deconstruction/reverse engineering, and then a recombination – perhaps in a similar form, perhaps in a slightly different form. Meta magick is the result of just such a deconstruction/reconstitution. Put another way, meta magick is magick that has been subjected to an intense critical process of “disenchantment” but has survived that process and regrown on the other side. The result is a philosophy of magick that can recreate the systematic structure of “old school” magick, but is freed, to a large degree from its ideological elements, and may have an as-of-yet-unconsidered trajectory into the future.

Now this being said – meta magick is not simply “chaos magic.” Chaos magick is of course rather famously a reduction-to-principles of the magickal act – however meta magick is conceived of as more akin to an advanced reconstitution of “traditional systems”, grown back to their “original size” and beyond, based on those principles that chaos magick reduces to. If chaos magick is “postmodern”, metamagick is post-postmodern. Meta magick is made of traditional magicks that have survived being subjected to the chaos magick process, and have regrown, albeit in newly integrated ways. 

What a classic system (or part thereof) tends to gain from this process is in terms of gaining  “open valences”, where before, they may have had tighter ideological limits that restricted their full expression in the common field. Even the case of highly syncretic systems – such as Thelema – those definitional restrictions can operate as a “bottom line.”

Meta magick has no such bottom line – it translates magickal systems into “fields” which can be plugged into one another in a modular fashion, and as such each meta magickian’s approach is going to be unique – and the meta magickian is not looking for “the correct system”, but playing with how human magickal systems can be combined to form “molecules” that assert a pressure on time itself. As such, it could be said that “Meta magick is the pressure of art, brought to bear on time”.

Meta magick is the pressure of art, brought to bear on time. All creative acts change the becoming of experience. At base, in meta magick we recognize – as with chaos magick – that there is something universal behind the rituals and procedures of specific magical traditions – that our magick “works” not because we performed the right exercise, but rather because we did it in the appropriate state, or register

Dr Peter Duchemin

PAA: What is your definition of Meta Magick and how is it different from traditional magical paradigms?

Meta magick is the pressure of art, brought to bear on time. All creative acts change the becoming of experience. At base, in meta magick we recognize – as with chaos magick – that there is something universal behind the rituals and procedures of specific magical traditions – that our magick “works” not because we performed the right exercise, but rather because we did it in the appropriate state, or register. Alan Chapman puts this extremely well in Advanced Magic for Beginners, where he defines magick as: “the art, science, and culture of experiencing truth”. As for definitions – I offer one, but I prefer that it not be “definitive” – after all, pinning magick down always seems to cause more distortions that it clears up. The history of magick is a history of contested definitions. I’d like my “definition” to be considered as more of an emphasis or a spotlight on some aspect of the art, and I would encourage others to define it differently – let each of us redefine magick, and let that be our magick!

That being said, “the pressure of art brought to bear on time”, fits me well – that was just a one-liner from my thesis, by the way, and one of my editors flagged it as particularly evocative. Since then, I have used it in almost all of my copy, and discussed it extensively. It is related to the saying “time is art” creditable to the Mexican-American new-age calendar magician José Argüelles. My focus is quite different from his, although I agree with the basic statement completely. 

My focus is on change as the fundamental reality – since I do not believe that we can know the “basic laws” of reality: law is a limited, anthropocentric concept rooted in our need to fix and stabilize the variables of our environment in order to feel “safe”. Instead, I hold that what we think of as Law is at best some kind of habit – this should shine light on why I spotlight time (as our experience of becoming), over space (as our experience of being)… It is not that I don’t think they collapse into one another – but rather that I see space collapsing into time and then time collapsing into eternity, and then eternity collapsing into boundless openess – in that order. 

Magick, then, involves ways that creative expressions call forth into existential display, some temporal experiences over others – not usually through cause and effect but via resonance and attraction: surely the ancient people’s cave paintings DID effectively allow them to hunt bison, or whatever they were after – but not because the painting “caused” the success, but rather due to the resonance that the painting had in focusing awareness single-pointedly and fully, leading to a temporal encounter of a successful hunt.

So to say magick, or meta magick is the pressure of art brought on bear on time, is to remove all content and all rules and all “laws” from magick, and simply to portray it as creativity calling worlds of different sorts to display themselves from out of the plenum of potential such expressions. 

A meta magickian, using this axiom, is free to become any expression of the universe that they can call forth through their Arte – let that art involve imagination, story, calculation – and let it entangle itself in the myriad momenta of all other stories as they play out – yet don’t lock it into a closed system – make it evolutionary, modular, and always fresh. Closed systems get chained together in open molecular assemblages – nothing is truly bounded – everything is transparent to eternity. 

The approach to the hunt that the neolithic peoples took was fresh – on the horizon of the creative – we should endeavor to bring all our magick to that horizon, whether it is traditional or not. We are not just pushing buttons – we are living vividly: it’s all quite messy. We should be present and alive in each performance of our art – never rote, never “because” – if we are active and bright in our work, and open to all potential times and all potential ways of shaping those times – then we are, I believe, doing meta magick. 

PAA: You mention Meta Magick as involving the “synthesis of myth, magic and science” – can you expand on what aspects are drawn from each domain and how they integrate together into the MetaMagick approach?  

The key to this is recognizing the “nesting order” – what could be called the meta magick ladder. This relates to the observation that we have successively experienced different “centers of the world” in our collective evolution – collectively we all share the unconscious legacy of being a species for whom, at one point the “center of things” was the personal location, crossroads, or compass rose – the center of the magical circle. 

As well, most societies have also developed a geocentric cosmology – in which the whole earth is at the center of things, and around which the planets (including the Sun and Moon) appear to wander. Our calendars and our cultural mythologies map us onto the larger cosmos by means of this centering. Notice how it does not physically cancel the compass rose, but rather, sublates it into a larger, more enveloping order – the magical center remains real, but the mythic order surrounds and conditions it. The mythic becomes the aura of the magickal…

Next, we can see that some societies, especially those following suit with the scientific and Copernican revolutions in Europe have built themselves around a heliocentric model – a development which comes with philosophy, reason, and science. It is interesting to note that the heliocentrism existed as a sub-culture as far back as a millenia or so before Copernicus, and this often ignored precursor tradition represented the nascency of this center – prior to its emergence as the dominant model. It was known – it just wasn’t commonly accepted as the norm.

The “revolution” framed the heliocentric model as “correct” and the geocentric model as an illusion – but considered in the light of the current knowledge of the universal structure, it is clear that the heliocentric cosmos is every bit as contingent and relative a center as the geocentric (something that Giordano Bruno was able to see clearly). This recognition allows us to re-evaluate the rather forced “opposition” between scientific knowledge – which grounds on heliocentricity and mythical knowledge, which grounds on geocentricity. 

We can now recognize how these centers do not in fact displace or cancel, but rather include or envelope each other in the order of their evolutionary emergence – magic is thus enveloped by myth, which is subsequently enveloped by reason, which is finally enveloped by the developing galactic centering (which will not, it is clear, be the final centering – the process is OPEN). Each center is a world, and each world is a kind of organ in a developing integrated body. Integrality – fitting working modules together into synergetic wholes – is the method of the galactic center, and it ripples back and commensurates the other levels, bringing them into energetic alignment and synchronization with one another. Each center is its own world-order, its own paradigm, and its own independent economy of thought and ecology of energy. We thus have a body with at least four operative levels – each with its own language that must be learned, lest we make the mistake of collapsing the planes, and throwing the whole system into imbalance. 

Consider this multi-level, meta magickal “organism”: Magick is at the root, developed by myth, checked by reason, and then modularized by integrality. This is how meta magick is possible – basic magickal energies and the stories that carry them, are deconstructed to the point of understanding but then regrown organically as part of a living tradition – magick rises up the meta-magick ladder and blooms like a pheonix on the other side of the abyss of reductionist scientific materialism.

Meta magick gives us the confidence to approach standard rituals and systems in a non-superstitious way, that is nevertheless untainted by profanation into materialism. The meta magickian still views the material as sacred, and yet in a different register and with different implications than the traditional views. 

Dr Peter Duchemin

PAA: In what specific ways does a Meta Magick practice differ technically from standard rituals or techniques in traditions like the Golden Dawn, Thelema, Wicca, etc? What is unique about the procedure or underlying framework that distinguishes it as “MetaMagick”?

Meta magick gives us the confidence to approach standard rituals and systems in a non-superstitious way, that is nevertheless untainted by profanation into materialism. The meta magickian still views the material as sacred, and yet in a different register and with different implications than the traditional views. 

This is well demonstrated by the meta magick approach to Enochian magick. Traditional Enochian magick is very much based on a metaphysical story telling exercise– the idea is that angels are telling us something about the objective nature of the metaphysical world. In meta magick, however, we don’t necessarily assume this narrative as objective fact: we start with the historical documents, and then look at the semiotic mechanics of the system, and then we ask ourselves (skeptically): what is actually going on here, if we suspend our “beliefs”? 

Accordingly, we find ourselves with an artifact – or series of artifacts – the watchtowers etc… that certain people have believed certain things about. Now, the nihilist skeptic will take this as grounds for dismissal – but meta magickians are not nihilist skeptics – they employ skepticism, but not to dismiss – only to provide a different view on the nature of the artifact or practice.  The skepticism’s role is to baptize the material in ideological doubt – without destroying it. We are asking, in effect – what does this material radiate into manifestation – purely as a result of its structure and nature and presence? Sometimes these manifestations are quite different than the frames of ideology that surround them. This is very much the case with Enochian.

So, basically, we are not going to say “yes, these are objectively messages from angels about the metaphysical hierarchy of the world and its objective transcendental structure” – but we ARE going to say “these can be experienced as messages from angels about the metaphysical hierarchy of the world and its objective transcendental structure”. They are such an artifact as to be able to evoke these kinds of encounter – but what can we know that they ARE? They are writings, they are combinations of letters and patterns. They are encrypted layers of “names” that can be given associations and can display a richness of structure – they are far from “deluded nonsense” like a nihilist skeptic would say. They are powerful, insightful and intriguing.

They are, if nothing else, a kind of proof of concept of how signs and symbols can be used in a certain way to create powerful mantras and store memory in the lines of a virtual grid. They are a sort of cryptic coordinate system. They can be used to trace sigils in the air using only the sound of our voices, if for example, the grid of a watchtower is imaginally superposed upon the visual field, and the sigil is translated into some pattern of cells, and those cells’ letters “intoned”. The Enochian materials are – we know for SURE – a method of imaginal focus that was introduced under the auspices of a certain story at a certain time by certain men and that it has certain properties and capacities. We do not need to assume anything about metaphysical law to “get” Enochian. It is what it DOES – the medium IS the message.

And now we can innovate – rather than pickling Enochian or treating it like a “dangerous” sacred cow, we can understand the innovation itself – view it like a technology – perhaps like a precursor to modern computing, and then play with that innovation – try different angles, different approaches – “skin it” in different ways – reverse engineer it. 

So, for example, in my courses I show how to arrange the thirty Enochian aethers in a mathemagickal hexagon – this is in no way traditional. I treat it as a pattern compression technology in the form of a thought experiment. I dispense with the “calls to the Aethers”, I don’t include Liber Logaeth, or even the Sigillum Dae Aemeth. I simply treat the watchtowers as a mantric generator, that if liberated of its accumulated blinds (and I suggest reading David Allan Hulse’s The Western Mysteries for this), is a remarkably clear, elegant, and potent mnemotechnic “machine”: it grants practitioners the ability to vastly amplify the “surface area” of their internal memory, creating blocks like memory banks, and increasing the sensitivity to detail that the practitioner can exercise – while at the same time bringing that heightened perception together into a whole – synthesizing it without extant “noise” or contradiction. It operates here to exert its influence as a gestalt upon the common field by shining through the adept and into the world.

As per this example, and many more, meta magick can help us realize the true spirit and impact of magickal systems as attentional modulators. It raises the objects up through the three inner “world systems” of magic, myth, and reason, and it establishes them in the clear light beyond – at the same time as it holds them at all three levels – simultaneously. In other words, it engages a given occult system with every rung of the meta magick ladder by simply recognizing their innate energy (lococentric), engaging with their storied and mythopoeic overlays (geocentric), clearing them with agnostic skepticism (heliocentric), and then raising them as “true events” to the level of integral contemplation (galactic-centric).

It is here – at the integral climax of the nested worlds – that these systems emanate the meta magickal fields, radiating their coherence into the common basin. It is here that they become time-attractors in the purest sense.

PAA: What inspired you to create this new approach to magick? What problems were you trying to solve?

I am not certain that this is as new as it might appear. I think meta magick is one articulation of a developing perspective that has been incubating for a few hundred years. For me, the formulation of “meta magick” grew rather slowly, under the cover of the process of writing my PhD dissertation. I thought I was just talking about magic, but I was bringing in a lot of different strands, including stage magic, occultism, mysticism, and postmodern philosophy. By the time I realized that I was articulating something substantially different than many of my peers, I had already written my dissertation, and had already proceeded to enact my findings in practice. 

Shortly thereafter, I began to realize that I was in the midst of a major occult revival in terms of the popularity of Tarot, and other practices, and that at least a good part of that revival was driven by a fairly strict ethos of scholarly reading of texts like the Papyri Graecae Magicae and such. I of course, had cut my teeth on more futurist and less historically “accurate” modes of esotericism like that of the Golden Dawn, Thelema, Discordianism and Chaos magick – and also my work was filtered through the philosophy of Michel Serres and Gilles Deleuze – thinkers who could be associated with French deconstructionism. Consequently, I appear to have become a bit of an odd duck.

At any rate, the catalyst for the mature theory actually came about when I read Jean Gebser’s Ever Present Origin, and it absolutely set my heart on fire. I realized that what I was doing was essentially magick from a galactic center of reference, and that this embraced and transformed reason, myth and traditional magics (like the PGM) from a very contemporary locus. Gebser’s four “mutational structures” became my “four centers” – as I added my own insights surrounding universal models (one that drew on Marshal McLuhan’s axiom “medium is the message” at the same time as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Meta magick, then, is an adaptation of Gebser’s luminous account of Origin and spiritual transparency (diaphany) to my own engagements with occult systems and embodiment based post-structural philosophy. 

So “the problem to be solved” becomes rather simple and it is the same as the “Babel” problem – our attempts to give a totalizing account of the real always fall short of the actually real, and when those “solutions” succeed, they do so only for a time – as long as the foundation that supports that solution is the central and accepted foundation. But centers shift and are displaced – old foundations crumble and new foundations are built on their ruins. When this occurs, then contending world-stories develop. Oftimes our biggest problem is that we are presented with multiple, parallel, equally effective solutions that are competing for dominance with one another. This dissonant state of affairs is exactly what integrality addresses: when presented with multiple paths to Truth, discover the account of Truth that allows it to be accessed by all those multiple paths.

I wish to assist in the process of fitting together the different world stories (magical, mythic, rational/scientific) so that they don’t collapse into competing ideological camps, and thus lose their real spirit, and instead “hook up like Voltron” as the saying goes – leading to a whole, open ecology with possibilities for evolution and full play given to all the key human endeavors – the creative and the reflective. 

I am seeking to articulate a magick that does not end in a cul-de-sac, but opens up into the full range of human capacities, and STAYS open. I am not interested in reifying a new category of “magick”, but in developing a truly universal method, adequate to our current situation, and functioning on the very threshold of our world-making capacities. Meta-magick is my understanding of magick as it occupies the contemporary threshold of all our skills, abilities, and stories, and as it peers into an unscripted unknown that is our collective future. Here is where we can take responsibility and have true, salvific, impact. The problem is, how do we achieve the diaphany of all worlds amid the divine plenum of all potential realities?

PAA: You mention harmonizing different centers of consciousness like the compass rose, earth center, sun center, etc. Can you give a concrete example of how this synthesis works in practice?

I have discussed it in theory quite extensively – in practice it can take on either a contemplative or a ritual form. Contemplatively speaking, it is enough to simply practice the perspectives – learn magic rituals and how they conjure elements and spirits and such– feel them in the primordial sense of their reality, and in their anarchic denial of absolute law. Learn the pact, the circle, the hedge magics of sympathy and sorcery. Practice this and make this level of experience robust through contemplation and play, either within a tradition or across several, as in chaos witchraft.

AT the same time, let this not be the only muscle that you exercise – also begin to explore myths as they relate to unconscious archetypes – learn stories that structure long-term epic developments – learn the magick of calendars as they carry a collective cultural narrative across epochs. Practice and learn astrology – the art of qualitative time. Learn it from multiple perspectives – tropical, sidereal, classical – immerse in it.

But don’t let it end there. Realize that our phantasies are subject to distortion and illusion – explore the roots of philosophical skepticism, from Socrates to Hume – take the time to understand how we have used reason – deduction and induction, to take leaps beyond the world as our visionary souls presented it – to escape mythopoeic literalism. Read Spinoza. Learn how to disenchant, and to move beyond the apparent, to discover hidden causes and conditions. Learn how to science: proper agnostic methodologies – test things out and see what happens without assuming a narrative. Learn how to move beyond your belief systems.

BUT… don’t let this descend into nihilism or reductive materialism – both stop-gap belief systems, with themselves no necessary relation to science, save as as a kind of attempt to synthesize the enormous gulfs in our understanding that we have become aware of in order to make us feel less afraid – by cynically throwing out our stories and imagination. NO. Learn how we are NOT passive observers, and that our stories and imagination have always been the ways through which we ourselves have interfaced with the world – they may be fictions, but they are not illusions in the sense of falsities – the magickal and mythical carry our attention, and our memories, and give us the very ability to reason and science- they radiate trueness and create worlds to live and contemplate within– don’t let nihilistic materialism cannibalize the very roots of our thinking capacities, which are in the rich storehouse of metaphors that we use to remember patterns and grow our reasoning (for this, see George Lakoff’s Metaphors we Live by) – embrace the magickal, the mythical, AND the scientific. Don’t make straw-men out of any of them, and if that seems to result in an uncomfortable contradiction or paradox – sit with it, lean into the paradox. Don’t collapse the narrative like Alexander cutting the Gordian knot – endeavor to truly solve it – stay with it. This is integration.

Hold contradictory ideas simultaneously in an alchemy of synthesis, having faith that these stories cannot truly exclude one another, and each’s truths must necessarily converge. Seek that point of convergence. Commit to this quest, long though it may be. Construct calendars if necessary to carry the effort beyond your lifetime.

This describes the contemplative means of aligning the centers. The main thing here is that over the long term, we practice discernment – we don’t cancel any of the perspectives: we seek to cultivate an affinity with all of these modes so that we can tease apart any practice or system and cultivate aspects of it that resonate with every center on the ladder. When this ability is in our toolkit, and we can use it consistently, we are meta magickians.
The ritual means would be at once more simple than this, and yet more visceral. As this is specifically the subject of question 7, I will give the second half of the answer to this question, there.

PAA: What role do mathematical magical figures like magic squares play in MetaMagick? Can you give a specific example?

One of the key ideas that allows Meta Magick to develop a modular approach to magickal systems is that magical figures such as magick squares, circles andWstars represent a kind of optimized arrangement of numbers that establish a resonance which is more than the sum of its parts. For example, the magick square of Saturn, what the Chinese call the Lo Shu, consists only of the numbers 1-9 and those numbers are arranged in a special way that allows a magick sum (15) to emerge on the horizontals, diagnols and verticals. What makes this even stronger is that there is only one unique arrangement (disregarding mere reflections and rotations) of those numbers in a 3×3 grid – such that it can be said that this tuning is “discovered” and not fabricated. It has been said that magick squares are like “frozen music” and often have structural symmetries that resemble the Chladni patterns that occur in sand when it is vibrated musically or through “cimetics” – the musical vibration of liquid surfaces.

With this as the starting point, and the recognition that such systems have been involved in magickal systems for all of human history (considering not just the western Kameas, but the I Ching, and it’s cousin the Tai Hsuan Ching, as well as other systems and word squares like the Abramelin squares), then we can draw the inference that these special and optimal arrangements allow magickal systems (which are usually based around divinatory oracles – or what amounts to the same thing – memory classifications of possible meaningful events) to be arranged in these mathemagickal arrays!

In meta magick then, we open up the borders of what constitutes a magick square talisman, and go looking for mathemagickal arrangements that we can map occult systems onto. One of the best resources for this endeavor is Cliff Pickover’s brilliant the Zen of Magic Squares, Circles and Stars. In it are hundreds of different types of magickal number arrangement – drawing out of the annals of recreational mathematics, in multiple dimensions and in myriad forms. Meta magick uses these. Since the basic logic is that a mathemagical figure causes a series to resonate to a new frequency (the magick sum), then we find ways of taking systems such as the Ogham and causing it to become a toroidal singularity that radiates pentagrams, or the I Ching line oracles and connecting them to the combinatorial expressions of the hypercube, or linking the Enochian aethers with porous hexagonal tiling arrays that give out the magick sum of 93.

Amazing connections, extensions, and harmonizations are possible in this way, but what is more is that these figures are so compact, and their energy is so singular, when treated in this way, that the individual systems can become modular, and be connected in surprising ways to one another. Meta magick fields, with their open valences, allow entire magickal systems to be bonded together like molecules.

One such example is as follows – there is a very unique figure, I call it the “Sunflower array”: a magickal hexagon tiling of order three – which is absolutely unique, it is the only regular tiling of magickal hexagons of ANY order at all – this makes it even more singular than the Lo Shu. It consists of nineteen hexagons. When a magickal system of nineteen elements is mapped onto it (or when the numbers 1-19 are simply “scryed” for their properties) the dry mathematical framework becomes a host for the imaginal and phantasmic content that the magickal system overlays – that content is then in turn set to resonate as a singularity.

In my experience this is a very solar figure and operates very well as a map of the Metonic cycle – the 19-year cycle of Sun, Moon, and Earth that allows us to predict eclipses – the Baha’i calendar is based on it and so the Bahai’s months, which are named after attributes of God, may be used on this hexagon. So with these elements in place, we can actually enter into the structure of the figure in our visionary state, clothe ourselves in it and take it up as our auric nimbus, so to speak. We would do this by going in and with the eyes of the heart, occupying the central cell, which incidentally is the number five. It is important that we feel this, not just think it – then the emotional energy radiates as a harmonized aether-feild, out into the body of eternity.

What makes this even more striking is that the Lo Shu ALSO centralizes the number five – and note, this is not constructed or arbitrary – it is a discovered mathematical fact that five must occupy the center of these highly singular structures in order for them to become magically resonant!

So now consider that we may “enter” the Lo Shu and clothe ourselves with it in the same way – in fact most martial arts from China do, and numerous other systems privilege this figure – David Chaim Smith uses it as the framework for his map of the “Nine Chambers of Kether”, featured in many of his works, but especially in Deep Principles of Kabbalistic Alchemy. 

So, assume we are “bracing” into the Lo Shu, and have hosted one or more magickal systems upon it and charged them through immersive, heart-based practice, so it is now emanating a meta magickal field – that central cell “5” operates as a coupling-point with the central cell of the Hexagon tiling, which means we can join them together, almost as if we are chemically constructing a molecular bond – the 5 becomes a trunk, shared by BOTH fields, and the remaining 8 cells of the Lo Shu become a field of roots, while the remaining 18 cells of the hexagon tiling become a field of branches – our metamagick “tree” thus has 27, or (9×3) components, in total – all resonating together. Eight lunar roots, eighteen solar branches, and a solunar axis mundi that connects them as a shared valence.

This joining is not unique. The meta magick method frequently maps magickal systems to different arrays and then joins those arrays in “meta-molecules” that allow two or more different magickal paradigms to contribute their energetic resonance in-toto into a kind of modular whole. Note that this is very different than just mashing systems together, or splicing them mindlessly – it allows each system to be a whole voice and then harmonizes those voices as if in a choir.

This is the ethos – not to deny or replace, or obstruct traditional systems, but to attempt to experiment with harmonizing their voices – insofar as those voices issue magickal fields, metamagickal molecules – and to explore and report our findings. This is the integral function of meta magick as it is technically applied. 

PAA: You talk about “meta magical fields” that arise when magickal systems are channeled through mathematical objects. What do these fields concretely do and how does a practitioner interact with them? 

I am pretty sure the above accounts answer a lot of this question, but I’ll try it in different words. Magickal systems assemble awareness into a gestalt and offer a “whole model” lens through which to see the world. This act of seeing is not passive though – not something a “subject” simply experiences. Seeing is a dynamic activity that can radiate forth into the world, coloring it. Seeing the world actually creates the world in a subtle sense – as such , a magickal system is like a stained-glass window – it lets the light through and paints pictures on it – and then those pictures tell stories, those stories are “cast forth” into the world, where they mold our experiences of becoming and then our experiential engagements with those stories inspire new pictures and new stories and so forth in a feedback loop– it is all very active, and it contributes to the world – creates with it, so to speak. 

This effect of radiant seeing can be described as a kind of existential effulgence (or radiation) that stems from the practitioners awareness itself, and then casts its light (however configured) onto the world. These change time – SO, when we use a mathemagickal object like a magick square or star, we are tuning that magickal system, so as to display a kind of overtone or resonance – the powerful patterning of these objects gives them a singular beauty.

When a practioner shines awareness through a total suite of universal symbols AS CONFIGURED into a harmonic arrangement by means of a magick square, circle or star, that radiance directly influences and shapes time – what happens, what doesn’t happen – what is attracted into manifestation, what is repelled from manifestation. A meta magickal practitioner who has cultivated a rich system of fields can get to the point where they don’t have to “do” anything at all – their “self” does not have to intervene in states of affairs, because the fields carry them effortlessly toward where they need to be and away from what they don’t need to be. This can hit a stage where the effect compounds and amplifies exponentially, and in resonance with many mages, in synchrony.

The meta-mage becomes the fields themselves – is fully translated into fields – and as such their open valences carry them beyond subject and object, self and other. Meta magick fields become the transpersonal textures of time itself. In this apocalypse we transcend the status of “individual”, and transform so as to become like unique spotlights ranging across an ever-flowing and endless river. Sometimes we overlap, sometimes we depart, but we no longer tend to collide.

PAA: What is calendar hypnosis and how does the Gregorian calendar negatively impact magickal work? How does MetaMagick attempt to counteract this? 

Calendar hypnosis refers to the conditioning effect that following a given calendar has on the mind of individuals and on the structure of societies. Calendar hypnosis can manifest in many forms, some beneficial, some harmful – it can be unconscious or conscious. Metamagick attempts to harness calendar hypnosis consciously to generate widespread and enduring social, psychological and spiritual transformations. In particular, we are seeking to incubate the development of a social arrangement called synarchy.

Synchrony is the great power that allows us to rise beyond the dichotomy of self and other. If my meta-magickal approach were to be given a political label, I would choose “synarchist”, meaning government-by-synchronization. This potential social arrangement is possible because meta magick adepts are effectively modular configurations of magickal fields with different shapes and characters that can hook up and connect to each other in great, volunteeristic structural arrays. Those arrays form the synchronic sub-structure of our emergent integralist society – at once neither hierarchical, nor orderless – but something that evokes Buckminster Fuller’s vision of tensegrity: wherein the structural strength of a dome comes equally from all the points of its form, provided that the design is sound and the principles are applied. Each meta magickian, operating to sculpt time in a modular and open array becomes a nexus in the tensegrity matrix that functions as collective, dynamic armature supporting society as a whole. This vision sees us actually sublimating external institutions of governance, and rebuilding their essential functions as part of our emergent understanding of time. This will truly come about once we learn how to reprogram our calendars.

A calendar does not measure time, it shapes it and sculpts it – it takes the raw fact of enduring presence, and then en-wraps it in a frame that contextualizes “past” and “future” in terms of certain directions, associations, programs, and values. Calendars clothe time in a framework that allows for social organization, collective memory, and a concept of recordable history. 

The Gregorian calendar is the latest modification of the Roman/Julian calendar, which originally began as a work schedule for part of the year, and eventually became a totalizing narrative for time itself – the Gregorian modification came about at the dawn of industrialization and was meant to increase the calendar’s quantitative accuracy – and furnish it to interact with new technologies such as the clock – especially in terms of how the clock relates to production and mass production. This new calendar instantiated the ethos “time is money” and made it possible to conceive of the wage – at the same time it came with a utilitarian perspective towards the resources of the world.

The Gregorian calendar conjured capitalism into manifestation, and at the same time was conjured into manifestation BY capitalism – it is capital’s operating system. It portrays time like an infinite train track, moving inexorably forward, and being driven by “progress”. It powers an ideology that has colonized most of the world and extracted its wealth. It privileges institutions that can think in long arcs, and it disadvantages “ordinary people,” supplying only a 30 day “paycheck to paycheck” rhythm for us to follow, even as “inflation” dilutes the value of the wages we earn (and thus the leverage value of each of our individual presents). The Gregorian calendar is a bit like a bad social media platform that has become intoxicated with its own monopoly, and grown tyrannical.

The hyper-emphasis on the quantitative is at the expense of qualitative time – and even what qualitative time we can salvage – from say, astrology, gets quantified and sold back to us. The Gregorian calendar is like a great, leaking, slave-barge – a dependency machine that relies on us not seeing that we can sculpt time independent from it.

For this reason, the sacred calendars of the world are of some help- they show us alternatives – and yet they themselves are somewhat overpowered by the Gregorian’s inexorable march towards financial dominance: no other calendar’s inherent purpose is to transform time into money – and in a world in which money is accepted as the highest power, that gives the Gregorian the advantage.

In the late 20^th century, José Argüelles proposed that “time is not money, time is art”. He did this in the context of a new-age adaptation of the Mayan calendar, which much to the chagrin of many actual Maya, now quite often sells itself as the “true galactic calendar, and the authentic Wisdom of the Maya” to an assortment of non-critical practitioners. I am dubious about showcasing this product as the only answer to the dilemma that the Gregorian puts us in, and I consider Argüelles to be a cautionary tale, but I DO want to draw attention to the fact that “Time is Art”, interpreted BROADLY may be our best way out of the trap of incarceratory time (the Gregorian calendar is identified in meta-magickal calendrics as the very same same entity as Phillip K. Dick’s infamous Black Iron Prison – the Roman empire’s time-gulag).

Learning how to create, follow and multiply new calendrical narratives may be the best strategy to depressurizing the monopoly that the Gregorian has on money, and thus on magick.  As such, since 2003, I have constructed a system of 9+1 calendars entitled “The Ibisystem Orrery” which are calendars based on the orbits of the planets from Mecury out to Neptune, and inclusive of the Sun and Moon. The system functions like an orrery – weaving multiple timelines together into a braid, and proposing a vision of time that I call the “moment-focal sphere” a vast ball of time in which every calendar in the world passes through the direct center – the collective present. Out of this common heart, a million diverse timelines bloom. 

The effort here is not to destroy or even replace the Gregorian, but rather to make its monopoly obsolete by out-designing it. It is my sincere belief that a revolution in calendrics with be the keystone to a society-wide global transfiguration that will liberate us from the current morass into which our obsolete world views- as yet un-adapted to the galactic register of awareness – have fallen.

We will outgrow the Gregorian calendar’s grasp – meta magick is the pressure of art brought to bear on time, and new magick calendars are the fulcrum upon which we will amplify that pressure exponentially beyond the level that the relic-calendars are capable of exerting.

The Meta Magick ladder is our House in the cosmos: we are at home at our root, our heart, our throat, and our head: in magic, myth, reason and integration.

Dr Peter Duchemin

PAA: Can you walk through a simple MetaMagick ritual step-by-step so people understand what it looks like in practice?

Okay, here is a basic daily practice, which I call the metamagick ladder rite:

Stand and breathe, imagining yourself in a vast circle (or oroboros) then, focus attention on your root – the sex center. Imagine a taproot going down into the center of a crossroads and connecting to the fundamental, primordial elementality of embodied experience – fire, water, air, earth – hot, cold, wet, dry – four qualities contending before the formless chaos that the Greeks called apieron. Root into the circle and claim your magick powers in your sexual core. Activate the compass rose.

Next, put your attention into your solar plexus and envision the whole world at your heart – encircled by the seven classical planets – witness the Ptolemaic cosmic picture – a “sublunary” sphere of elements, inside eight crystalline circles – the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and finally a hole-pocked, star-strewn  “firmament” of the heavens, encasing it all. Feel how you can transfer your awareness from the lococentric root perspective, where immediacy resides, up to the collective world level, where destiny abides.

Now, move your focus to your throat…. Feel yourself going beyond the firmament – it opens up, the picture shifts into a Heliocentric register, and the Sun takes centre stage – the dreamy visions evaporate, and a clear vista of forces emerges – move beyond destiny to the domain of rational objectivity. Spirits are replaced by “facts” determined by observation, and here is where you can weave a network of dynamic, rational concepts that connect all those facts into probabilistic “bets” about what is going to happen in any given state of affairs – this is the predictive power of science. See the solar system itself from the perspective of the Sun, – all the planets, moons, asteroids, comets – the physical reality divorced from story and available to observation alone.  Feel how skepticism can lead to a “crowned agnosticism” that merely observes and learns, and does not assume. Ideological neutrality. Avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of theological ideology on the one hand and materialist nihilism on the other, pass through the gate of true, humble, awe-struck agnostic witnessing of the vastness of space and time. Become the mind of true science.

Draw back down, on the mythical cosmos of Ptolemy, in the heart, and on the magic compass rose of elemental forces at your root. Sense how they nest, one within the other, enveloped and interconnected. Consolidate these integration.

Migrate your awareness to your head and shift your perspective to the very center of the Galaxy, the black hole that is Sagittarius A. See how the solar system is located in the Andromeda arm of that galaxy and is amongst myriad millions of worlds. Luxuriate in the vast inclusion of all stars and world. Let your awareness also reach downward back from the galactic head into the heliocentric throat and the geocentric heart, all the way to the lococentric root. Flow back up: feel magick grow into myth into reason, and finally into diaphanous clarity as the galaxy embraces the sun, embraces the earth, embraces the crossroads. Feel them all in concord, each center with the others – they have NEVER been separate – they have always been one in their diversity.

To finish, turn your awareness at once to the outside – above and below – the sky of infinite futures – structures beyond the galactic, and to the earth of infinite microcosms – beneath the crossroads into the hearts of each atom, and all the way into the minutia of light, thrumming into and out of existence at the planck length. Recognize that the four centres are our “visible spectrum” of capacities, afloat in an Origin that both subtends us and supertends us infinitely. We are bouyant within it – the way is open in either direction, yet we have established homes on all four cosmological centers. 

The Meta Magick ladder is our House in the cosmos: we are at home at our root, our heart, our throat, and our head: in magic, myth, reason and integration.

Breathe and let this vision become transparent. Let the circle dissolve into eternity like an ice cube into an ocean.

Re-assume your mundane consciousness, and go about your business.

PAA: You mention harmonizing chaos magick and traditional occult systems. What does each uniquely contribute and how are they synthesized? 

Chaos magick is like the mortar, and the traditional occult systems are like the bricks. If we consider what Chaos magick contributed to occult ,though: principally it is the ethos that a universal mechanism for magick can be identified – what Peter Carroll called “gnosis”, and that knowledge of this mechanism allows us to dispense with elaborate systems –and go direct to causing magickal “effects”. 

Carroll showed that it wasn’t the content of the rituals that cause the effect but rather the communication of non-dualistic intent – bypassing the conscious mind and going right to the unconscious that appears to evoke magickal results. Classic rituals are just elaborate mean of achieving this, according to Chaos magick.  Chaos magick thus becomes almost obsessively focused on results – “do what works, and discard the rest”. Needless to say there are many who felt that while this had some validity, it was, to a large extent “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. Are results the only thing that magickians and mystics are concerned with? Is “what works” necessarily the optimal method? Is “optimal” actually what we are all necessarily seeking in our practice? 

Alan Chapman, in Advanced Magick for Beginners achieves a subtly brilliant synthesis of traditional and Chaos methodologies – largely by stripping down the “mechanism” even more than Caroll did. He sets up perhaps the most clear set of instructions on how to do magick universally that has ever been published. At the same time, with his definition being “the art, science, and culture of experiencing truth”, in contrast to Crowley’s “science and art of causing change in conformity with will”, Chapman shifts the emphasis away from “results magick”, while keeping the clarity that the universalist magickal distillation has achieved. 

So basically what we are doing in Metamagick is extending this project and including all magickal systems – especially the traditional and elaborate ones – as arts, sciences, cultures of experiencing truth, and we are seeking to craft something of an ark – a magickal interlanguage that encourages the living conservation of as many culturally significant magickal systems as possible – while shining the light of clarity through them so as to clear them of undigested dogma.
Chaos and tradition need NOT be opposed as “open mindedness – versus dogma” (a state of affairs that brings out the worst qualities in all fields), but instead held together as moments – one moment a solve function and the other a coagula function. We are thus performing an alchemy on magick itself. The prize is something far more than ego’s desired “results.” It is the experience of truth in all its flavors.

PAA: What does a typical vision or communication with a meta-magickal field look like? How does it differ from working with traditional spirits or energies?  

Once, in a dream, I was given the word “Sasafoi” by a dream messenger. I was shown that it was an acronym for “Spontaneously Appearing, Self-Adjusting, Field of Influence”. This was the germinal idea that led to my contemporary articulation of “metamagick fields”. It was also influenced by my studies of the I Ching, Gilles Deleuze, and Rupert Sheldrake.

In meta magick, we train ourselves to sense these fields, and to talk about them, and I would say that the raw phenomena that combine to trigger the deployment of a meta magick field exist through all four of the integrated centers of the meta magick ladder – but they bloom as such fields only in the Galactic level. So meta magick actually allows for (and demands) all the different kinds of traditional working too – the style of vision or interaction will be appropriate to the level: pacts and sorcery on the logocentric/Compass rose level, astral travel and heavenly chariots on the geocentric/Ptolymaic level, quantitative analysis and scientific proofing on the heliocentric/Copernican level, and then finally on the Galactic level, all these phenomena display their real nature as haecceities that can at once be animistic, phantasmic, AND fact-generating. 

These are the meta magick fields, and when we cultivate an intrinsic connection to them, we can almost flex the energies like a muscle – we can feel them with a kind of magickal proprioception – an intimacy that is not mediated by thought, but is felt directly in the heart and sensed in the body.  We can connect to the aethers, their feeling tones, and their language-defying flavors and textures, and we can move in and through them, shape them, cultivate them, emanate and modulate them. We in fact BECOME the fields – as that is the secret… we have always already BEEN “spontaneously appearing, self adjusting, fields of influence” and that is what we all – and everything actually is. None of our previous apprehensions are negated, they just reach a culmination or climax in this visionary register. It’s quite an extraordinary experience – but I hesitate to suggest that I could pin down a “typical” example.

Essentially, in meta magick, you can have traditional experiences, sorcerous experiences, scientific experiences, even “mundane” experiences – but you can also raise each of these types of experience to the level of the universal horizon, and “wash” them in its openness. It is there that they become something beyond our ordinary vision of the world – something beyond, and beyond beyond – as the Sufis say, “God is closer to you than your own jugular.” Meta magick does not negate or alter anything – but changes the perspective through which all is seen.

When we ourselves are emanating a field, it opens space, and clears it of clutter, and at the same time makes it habitable for us. When we encounter someone with a strong “presence” we are coming into contact with their field. I think that the terminology I am using might make it all sound like something proprietary – but really I’ve just given a name to that kind of “bending” of the world that any strong and integrated locus of awareness has. 

We are actively seeking to concentrate and integrate our fields so we can extend them – both as ourselves, and in resonating chains and arrays with other adepts – but one need not be versed in – or have heard of “meta-magick” to extend such a field. Accomplished artists, martial artists, magickians, all have them – leaders of renown invariably project a field around themselves that bends time to their intent – think Winston Churchill, for example. The fields, in my experience, which essentially bend time – are a result of a connection to divine purpose – if they are rooted in egoism, they are, at the end of the day, quite weak, like sandstone – even if they appear superficially overwhelming – their granularity makes them subject to erosion.

Dis-integrated fields tend to either dissolve or double down on their unhappy arrangement and become vampiric or predatory – these pathological fields in some way are alienated from the great Horizon of which I spoke – they are claustrophobic spaces and their spirits feel imprisoned and are suffering. Such toxic fields are best dealt with by adepts who can show the right balance of compassion and firmness. Through the medium of the internet, it is currently possible for networks of dis-integrating fields to unnaturally prolong their existence by recruiting more and more unhappy and alienated people into their influence in a kind of horizontal contagion wave. Is there even an original agent? Doubtful. In vampirism, the hunger itself is the ultimate agent. Memes very often carry this – being as they are “pseudo-thoughts”, sound-bites, commercial jingles, and talking points – or what is the same: weaponized mnemonic devices. These are to real thought as the great garbage field is to the Sargasso sea – they clutter us, and assemble us into these dis-integrative amalgams.

As disturbing as this may be, acknowledging it is a step towards a powerful transformation – and when the view changes, even these sick, alienated fields of superficiality (what the Kabbalists would call Qliphoth), can become the prima materia for a genuine transmutation.
Even toxic fields can be redeemed and healed. This is, I believe the great task of the integral age – and field perception, free as it is from traditional superstitions, dogmas, and reductionisms, is the key to effecting this great healing, this Tikkun.

PAA: How can an average person start benefitting from MetaMagick without years of training in multiple occult systems? What are some beginner accessible techniques?

The simplest place to start is the ritual meditation that I provided in the answer to question 7. After that, I would recommend my meta magick scrying course, which is a crash course in meta magickal fields without any necessary knowledge of outside “occult systems.” After that, I would recommend the meta magick Tarot course, which will introduce the practitioner to many of the systems that come into use in my personal construction of meta magick.

PAA: In your upcoming Meta Magick Scrying course, you focus specifically on scrying magical squares and figures. Why is scrying these mathematical structures an important foundational practice for Meta Magick? What benefits does it provide?

A magickal figure is a kind of “frozen music” – it is an optimal arrangement of number-able elements that allows those elements to course with palindromic flows of consistency and coherence – in other words, it makes them resonate uniquely. At the same time, a magickal figure as it appears on paper is merely a curiosity – a recipe, if you will.

Number alone, unless one is a numerology adept, does not carry emotional or psychic energy – what the Tantrics might call “rasas”: feeling tones, aesthetic emotions. In order for our mathemagical figures and objects to disclose their real beauty, we need to load them with rasas. This is a bit like as if the figure were a garden plot, with specific, optimal positions for certain types of plant to be grown so as to maximize their interaction and synergy – but in its basic state, that garden plot is unused – fallow.

Scrying consists of projecting our imaginations into a target domain, while we are sufficiently at balance and in equilibrium to receive impressions from our unconscious without interference. When we do this properly, we can get very vivid images and associations. Sometimes these have tangible forms – like dream images and characters, and sometimes they are more like textures, or abstract patterns. No matter – the main thing is that a previously “blank” target domain now has some content – something sufficient to hold an emotional load. Emotion is our energy – where we feel emotions – whether gross or subtle – we are interacting with psychic energy. By finding an emotional response in each of cell of the figure – in this case the Lo Shu, we are actually placing real psychic energy into this harmonic arrangement, and it allows the grosser registers of the feeling tones to be refined – by means of the resonance, into finer registers – these finer registers are what radiate into eternity – into the plane of immanence – as meta magick fields. SO, when we scry the Lo Shu, or the Sunflower array, or the meta magickal merkabah, we are not just having a subjective experience – we are modulating the very makeup of our emotional/energetic constitution and training it to climax in these palindromic patterns that cause it to become more than the sum of its parts.

Remember, we don’t HAVE fields – on the ultimate level, we ARE fields – Spontaneously appearing, Self Adjusting Fields of Influence. When we do these exercises, we are raising our magic, myths, and reason to the galactic plane, and resonating like stars into the shared ecology of heaven.

PAA: You mentioned that in the MetaMagick Scrying course, students will be building a customized “merkabah” using the scried visions. Can you explain what a merkabah is in this context and how it relates to the meta-magickal fields you discussed earlier? How does having one’s own merkabah aid in magical work?

Merkabah, of course, means “chariot” in Hebrew, and the classical merkabah is drawn from the vision of Ezekiel. In the contemporary context the merkabah is associated to the geometric figure known as the stella octangula – or stellated octahedron. This figure can be pictured as either two large, interlaced tetrahedra, or as eight smaller tetrahedra “glued” to the sides of an octahedron. It is, truly both at once. At the same time, this frame perfectly fits to the volume of a cube. 

In standard contemporary magick as taught by the Builders of The Adytum (BoTA), and other schools, we can center and ground ourselves within a great cube called the “cube of space”. I have always leaned more towards the octahedron for this same effect, but the truth is that the octehedron and the cube are interchangeable: they are each other’s dual. The cube has six faces and eight corners and the octahedron has six corners and eight faces. The main point, however, is that they come together completely, when the octahedron is stellated.  At this stage, since there is a cube within the octahedron and an octahedron within the cube infinitely – this particular geometric “field” scales to infinity in both directions. In other words, this is a kind of field that can contain an infinite intensity, and allow it to manifest a coherent form.

In magickal visionary work, we at times encounter “aethers” and atmospheres that are exceptionally difficult for ordinary persons – for egos – to integrate. The merkabah becomes the astral vehicle of the adept because, with an activated merkabah, consciousness can encounter these intensities and atmospheres and retain its form and composure – even as the ego would dissolve on contact.

When we transfer our self-hood from our drives and neuroses over to the reliable framework provided by sacred geometry – insofar as it is animated by a sense of loving trust in the divine – then we gain the necessary tools to go beyond our “individuality” into transpersonal, spiritual, and interconnected spaces of great beauty and austerity.

The merkabah is the magickian’s space-ship for the exploration of visionary dimensions beyond the ordinary.

In meta magick we construct our merkabah using a mathemagical “tetrahedron ring” which is a special figure with the same kinds of resonance as a magick square, except that it produces a ring of eight tetrahedra which takes the numbers 1-32 as inputs and then harmonizes them to produce magickal sums within each tetrahedron. We use this technology to convert the Tree of Life, with its 32 zones (spheres and paths) into the merkabah. This integration then gives us what we need to practice the “work of the chariot” on the galactic scale.

PAA: You have created numerous unique occult calendar systems as part of your overall Meta Magick framework. What role do these specialized calendars play? How do they differ from traditional timing systems and how are they used by the practitioner?  

See my answer to question 6 for a good introduction to this issue. To answer here, briefly – the calendars allow meta magick fields to be socially generated: it is not just the individual practitioner that wields meta magick, but rather a kind of network of magickal amplifications that develops across the users of the calendars – since my calendars essentially act to clear out pathways in time through the anti-magickal friction zones that the Gregorian imposes, and since, being planetary in nature, they amplify specific energies – they play the role of gradually freeing us, individually, and socially – in the long term – from detrimental interference with our magickal trajectories caused by cultural “dampening fields” and other distortions that traditional calendars apply. 

The Ibisystem calendars accomplish this liberation by fulfilling the spirit of the Hermetic Axiom – “as above so below”, which has its roots, I believe in the chapter of Plato’s Timeaus, where he suggests that we imitate the heavenly movements in all our ratios and proportions, and seek to bring the pulse and rhythm of those motions into our lives on earth.  We are making calendar hypnosis completely conscious and evolving it to supply our contemporary needs for bigger, more coherent mythopoeic surface area.  While for the adherents of the Gregorian calendar, time is like a train track, for Ibisists, it is more like a coral reef.

The difference between meta-magick and classical magick here is that, in meta magick, unlike astrology, we are following the orbits of the planets as they circle the sun, rather than the cycles of conjunction and opposition that we see from the earth. The meta magick calendars of the Ibisystem Orrery are heliocentric in nature – they draw from the data of astronomers moreso than that of astrologers, however they do not deny astrology as a valid system on its own plane – they integrate the qualitative emphasis of the latter with the quantitative precision and simplicity of the former. Any calendar is a triple interface between psyche, cosmos, and socius. The calendars of the Ibisystem entrain an entire suite of braided planetary timelines into a kind of super time-cable. 

This is how we take full charge of our own calendar hypnosis, shake off any undesirable holdovers from previous conditioning, mitigate interference, and clear out anti-magickal residues. Traditional timing systems seek to “measure time” but they actually condition it – in meta magick we condition it directly – and in a manner conducive to the development of our integrative faculties.  We want to operate in a drag-free “superconductive” magickal temporality.

The polycalendrical system used in meta magick is meant to vastly deepen our overall understanding of what a calendar (or multiple calendars in tandem) can do. Practitioners typically use a given calendar by “following” it – that is by being part of a community that discusses the themes of that calendar as it moves through them (as for instance the way that the Venus calendar moves through the 32 paths of the Tree of Life in 32 weeks, or how the Mercury calendar moves through the 88 constellations in 88 days) – and if that practitioner wants to increase the intensity of the experience they can select a creative project or a series of ritual actions that they will complete or perform alongside the rhythm of the count – which is to say they will perform that activity over the course of a single orbit of the planet – harnessing its momentum and converting it into a metamagickal field by means of their creative or reflective engagement. This is what is called “chronoforming “ time. We take raw time – any oscillating body in the cosmos – and we transmute it into a metamagickal field by synchronizing a practice with it. The actual potential of this activity is limitless, and the Ibisystem is just the beginning.

In any event, as a practitioner begins to adapt to this methodology, they may want begin to add other calendars into the mix, and since the momentum of these calendrics is not isolated to any one individual, gradually the Orrery itself is charged and comes into life for the whole community of practitioners, and arguably for the whole occulture and culture – radiating a massively comprehensive, hermetically cogent set of time-evoking pressure fields across the entire “theatre of  human experience”, so to speak.

The pulse, or time song of the cosmos is written onto the Earth by the living practice of the meta magickal calendar wizards, in their irresistible dance of synchronicities. This is our synarchy.

PAA: You emphasize the importance of attentional control and management in MetaMagick. In what ways does MetaMagick train attention differently than standard occult practice? What attentional faculties are strengthened and how does this augment magical work?

I don’t want you to think that this control has to be strained, or forced – this has to emerge as a kind of natural and relaxed state – like that of a Kung-Fu master playing their forms. High activity and control – but without strain – this allows us to improvise, to play the various fields of emotional and aesthetic energy like a jazz ensemble – not rigidly, but adeptly and sensitively. A flow state.

So when I hear “train”, I almost want to replace the word with “cultivate” – to show the slow patience involved in growing these capacities. Practice, train, cultivate. “Control” comes out as a result of having diligently pursued these flow states, day after day, for years, decades, and lifetimes. There is no worthwhile shortcut to realization – all such cheat-codes cost more than they pay out.

There is no single way that meta magick trains this, either – except “all the ways”. Try them out! Vipassana, or Buddhist breath meditation – that is a good place to start. Juggling three or more objects will also get you there. Kung Fu is excellent practice. Essentially what we want to do is teach ourselves to re-collect presence whenever we can – to avoid falling into aimless or futile imaginary loops. To return to the moment and to feel our energy – our most authentic energy – and to open it all up before the fullness of eternity – in a sense to offer ourselves continuously and wholly to the divine – as we understand it. Then there is a flow that breathes like fresh air through everything – and attentional “control” becomes something different than we might at first think. 

Our awareness is itself a prayer and we can offer that prayer – ARE always offering it – to whatever we choose. The key is to raise that that prayer above mundane matters and offer it to the great and wonderous mystery itself. It takes a shift of character away from selfishness to do this, by the way – but the rewards are connection, transparency, clarity. There is not greater magic than sharing cosmic awareness and realizing ourselves as expression of the divine plenum.

At this stage, attention becomes devotion. Awareness worships itself on the purest level – and in doing so realizes it has no “self”. The borders are completely and forever open, and the sacred saturates everything, always.

Chop wood, carry water.

PAA: Thank you for another super indepth interview. You share so much in these posts and I hope readers can see that working with you in any capacity will be extremely useful.

Learn with Dr Peter Duchemin

If you would like to take the next step and start learning directly with Peter then there are two options as described below. The first being the in depth, huge 33 week Meta Magick Tarot course (it goes way beyond Tarot) and the second being the more introductory course focusing on Meta Magick Scrying.

Meta Magick Tarot

The Meta Magick Tarot is a unique, 3-part course which can be pursued on your own time, or synchronized with the 32 week calendar of Venus, the Forest of Life. The entire Tarot is covered in 32 lessons with PDFs, Video Support, and guided meditation for each class. The meta-magick philosophy is future oriented, and understands magickal thinking in a way similar to an engineer’s perspective. How can we build a uniquely powerful philosophy of creative tarot practice that we can live INSIDE? The content and materials will range from the basic to the advanced, and there are insights and innovations that you will find nowhere else.

Meta Magick Scrying

This course offers a concise and comprehensive seven-module program that guides students through the process of constructing a fundamental set of MetaMagick fields. These fields, which are underpinned by mathematically-based magickal structures, interlock to create a stable foundation for the MetaMagick practitioner. In essence, this course provides an accelerated introduction to the construction of a MetaMagick Merkabah – the visionary chariot.

Books mentioned in this Interview

Advanced Magick for Beginners by Alan Chapman

Ever Present Origin by Jean Gebser

The Western Mysteries by David Allen Hulse

Deep Principles of Kabbalistic Alchemy by David Chaim Smith

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

The Zen of Magic Squares, Circles and Stars by Clifford A. Pickover

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn