Plague of Strength

Andrieh Vitimus is the author of one of my favorite books on chaos magick, Hands-On Chaos Magic, which I put right up there with Peter Carroll’s The Apophenion as one of the seminal works on the subject. He’s also the coauthor of the badass occult anthology Magick on the Edge, and a contributing author multiple occult anthologies. As if that weren’t enough occult street cred, he ‘s a Hougan Asogwe (the highest rank in Haitian Vodou), a Reiki Master, an NLP practitioner, a licensed hypnotherapist, and faculty at Peter Carroll’s Arconorium College, and the host of the occult podcast, Deeper down the Rabbit Hole, which is basically an actually informative Coast to Coast AM on pcp and steroids.

Because I have received a ton of questions on chaos magick and had a few of my own, I decided to contact Andrieh to get some added insight into the practice of chaos magick, and to see if he could shed any extra light on the use of the occult in strength sports. I was absolutely not disappointed, because what follows is absolutely a slice of fried fucking gold.

JC: Andrieh, I’ve written a bit on the subject of Chaos Magick in this article, and have referred to it as the Jeet Kune Do of the occult- essentially, like Bruce Lee’s martial arts style, Chaos Magick is a condensed version of more traditional forms of occult workings that discards a lot of the pomp and flash of the old methods for a more brutal efficiency. Would you say that is accurate? Was I accurate in my direction to my audience? As I stated in the article, I am hardly an expert in the field.

AV: Sometimes, the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is no. Generally, the goal is brutal efficiency and more so brutal efficacy. Sometimes the flash helps get results meaning the goals of efficiency and effectiveness are at odds. Most serious chaos magicians would weight effectiveness as the measure of success. Ritual work is often an art form in itself much in the way painting and writing are. For myself, I will engage in beautiful flashy and pomp for fun. The difference from older traditional work, is through applying the scientific method to magic, I know such things are just additional tools in the toy box that can be fun to use, but are not strictly needed.

JC: I’m going to have to steal that line from you- “the goal is brutal efficiency and more so brutal efficacy,” because it’s about as poignant a statement about life as I’ve ever read, and the parallel between goals in strength training and chaos magic is identical. You’re coming out of your corner like the literary equivalent of a young Mike Tyson, with quotable phrases serving as a vicious left hook!

Additionally, your comment about engaging in the pomp and flash for fun has parallels in training, because as I’ve said many times efficiency and excellence are often goals at odds with one another. The law of diminishing returns on effort means greater effort will yield fewer results when you’ve passed the point of efficiency, but that extra effort is always necessary if you want to achieve full mastery and really exemplary performance in anything… and frankly, if you’re simply striving for efficiency rather than actually enjoying yourself, you should get out of our respective avocations/vocations and join an engineering firm building a more efficient widget in some drab, featureless building with Soviet-era marching music blaring over the loudspeakers of the building.

Getting back to the business of you, your background is incredibly varied in the occult- what would you consider to be the most effective of the more traditional methodologies, and what is your favorite quick and dirty chaos magick technique?

AV: No one set of tools will work for one thing and definitely not for one person. One goal of paradigm switching is to make sure you can get every different paradigm to work at the same level of effectiveness. That is actually hard. Each person will have biases and preferences that lend themselves more toward one paradigm them another. The idea is to be able to Grok the underlying structure of magic and reality enough that any paradigm can work. Now that said, I do have my favorites as well, but my preferences show a bias toward spirit friendly paths. Vodou and Conjure are great for fast in world results but require relationship management with the spirits. Ceremonial magic is often great for inner and outer world results, but the general materials available leave a lot of steps that are important out of the books. Hinduism is great for inner alchemy and when I am not feeling spirit friendly, I do Qigong and NLP.

JC: The nerd in my gets incredibly happy every time I run across someone else who loves Heinlein and uses the word “grok”- most people don’t realize that Stranger in a Strange Land was a lot of the impetus for the American Sexual Revolution. That is definitely interesting about the ceremonial magic, and it seem that joining a group that participates in ceremonial magic might be a good step.

You’re really running the full gamut of esoterica here, haha, and have a really holistic approach to the occult. Though I’ve tried to dip my toes into just about everything, I have to admit I am wholly ignorant about Vodou and Conjure. Do you have a resource you recommend for those?

AV: So I have a few books I like, but the books are less helpful then doing the magic. Unfortunately, Vodou has become extremely cultural contentious but I like all the books Mambo Vye Zo Komande LaMenfo for Haitian Vodou, Louis Martine for New Orleans Voodoo. With Conjure, I feel like there is a plethora of materials to google. Tons of recipes, advice, and herbal lists. I am not sure it is helpful since the emphasis is on the wrong things (although the recipes are useful), they do not actually teach the fundamentals you need to actually get that type of work to work. For Vodou, my advice, get it right with your ancestors. When I was doing the podcast, we recorded some materials on this here.

Vodou is really about relationship management with spirits, which is a useful lesson even in other paradigms. Second, go to the crossroads and give Legba some rum and candy. He’ll take it from there. I do recommend you try to find a teacher for Vodou or conjure, but really I know there are a ton of scam artists. You have to be able to relate to the person as a person. For instance, while I am a initiated Hougan, I tend to do New Orleans Voodoo all the time in private, but you would have to get to know me for me to invite you to a ritual. Although, I do teach conjure publicly, and yes I was taught a lot by inner city Chicago conjure people and then quickly took what I was taught into multiple arenas.

JC: That is incredible- although I suppose it shouldn’t beggar belief to allow white people to practice Voudon, I would have expected it to be a very insular community. As I mentioned in our correspondence, my sole understanding of Voudon (which is obviously insanely limited) is that it involves enough dead frogs that I’ve referred to it as frog magic. Apparently, however, it can be conducted without the wholesale slaughter of our amphibian friends. I do have a bit of experience in blood magic, though it ended very badly, was extremely hard to break, and has left me a bit gun shy in that regard. Do you practice any Blood Magick? I’ve used the workings of Sorceress Caligastro in the past. I would think that would have very easy applications to strength sports/physique goals, though it seems to have unintended consequences that leave me reticent to use it. Any thoughts?

AV: Blood magic is very powerful and the consequences depend on what you are working with. Blood creates a link between you and the intention or spiritual force you work on. I don’t have Sorceress Caligastro’s methods, but if you are connecting to are negative or entropic for you, the effects on your body/blood/personal universe will also have negative effects. The key to the idea is that spirit or force is negative or entropic to you, not needfully what other people or books label as negative.

Now using blood as a offering or link can have really good effects for strength sports/physique goals if used with entities or forces that promote strength and vitality. Many warrior gods and goddesses can help with these goals. The most important part of blood work is to start slowly and build up the relationship with the spirit before offering or using blood.

If you are doing an intention with blood work without a force, blood can be a direct and great connection. The problem is that it is a direct connection for better or worse.

JC: Haha- that is an incredibly astute comment. That direct connection really could have gone either way in my experience, and tragically, it went sideways on me. I do have a small Sekhmet shrine, so perhaps I’ll give that a second go with nothing but strength goals in mind- I have a sense that is going to be my biggest takeaway from this interview (which is jam-packed with badass takeaways).

It always interests me to discover how others arrived in the occult. My personal journey bounced from a Catholic upbringing that left me thinking that either something was broken in me or in Christians, because the threats and begging involved in Christian services were absurd and pathetic to me, and I felt nothing when “in the presence of god” beyond contempt. I learned a great deal about Eastern mysticism in my undergraduate studies, then European neo-paganism thereafter, but that in particular just seemed to be people who felt ostracized by society banding together in opposition to Christians, rather than having a true appreciation for the deities they professed to worship. After reading Lavey’s stuff I was intrigued by the intent and message of Satanism but put off by their love of pageantry, and eventually I found and really enjoyed the practices and attitude of Luciferianism and Chaos Magick.

Though maybe not as circuitous as my own, I’d imagine a lot of people have similarly complex beginnings in the occult. How’d you arrive here?

AV: Honestly, I too came from a Catholic albeit Eastern Orthodox set of rites and almost went to seminary. To me most of the rituals correspond closely to ceremonial magic and every year we would have our windows and doors blessed. I like to say the Eastern Orthodox is the catholic church that believes in demons and angels. I left for very different reasons that mostly dealt with a philosophy that many people demand compliance with and then act in a manner completely antithetical to the core teachings and use those teachings to justify some pretty horrible actions. I quickly moved toward a very agnostic/atheist view of the world believing organized religion is the suckers bet. I have a more nuanced view now. For me however, the spiritual world really just had different ideas and I experienced some extraordinary weird things. Shadows would move, my luck went to absolute shit, my friends would freak out about the shadows. It got so bad, I just couldn’t ignore it. For a long while, I just passed it off as “insanity” until people confronted me about the weirdness that sometimes happened around me. This experience fits the pattern of shamanic initiations and I can see the pattern in some occultists, especially Chaos magicians, where actual experience either through drugs or other means forces them to question the stable reality proposition or the strictly materialist view of things. That said, I still try to be reasonably objective and use the scientific method in all my magical work. I might have a lot of personal evidence that spirits may exist, but I would not make a truth claim on what that actually means. I do have some theories and give myself license to change that as needed.

If you apply the principles and metrics from the social sciences, you can get reasonable evidence that something, let’s call it magic, is happening. You can see correlations. The problem with the social sciences is that is is very difficult to prove causation because so many variables interconnect. Magic and spirituality is very similar in that many variables interconnect affecting multiple parts of the system. I believe the way we teach and talk about magic is wrong. Once I start getting pretty shocking correlations, I realized religion probably hides and masks some of the underlying potential in magic if we approached magic from a non-religious pov.

JC: I would definitely agree with you in regard to your comment about hiding and masking the underlying potential- to me it is similar to the modern medical establishment discouraging and in some cases criminalizing effective alternative methods. It’s a method for control, I suppose. The same goes for occultists who shroud their workings in secrecy or esotericism to the point that the lay practitioner cannot separate the wheat from the chaff. It shouldn’t surprise you that the same goes on in the strength training world, which is a trend I’ve been striving mightily to drive into the ground.

Continuing that parallel, modern occultists seem to get along about as well as a sack full of wet cats, even within their own sects (like Satanism, which now seems to have a “Christianity repackaged” thing going on with the Temple of Satan). Strength athletes tend to be the same way, constantly engaging in bickering and infighting that detracts from the overall goal of getting inhumanly strong. In the occult, why do you suppose this is? Since Chaos Magick has a much more meta feel, do you think it could be the unifying force in the occult world? I ask for two reasons- personal curiosity, and then the thought that perhaps a similar method could be used to reunite strength sports.

AV: First, the issue of why occultists do not get along has many parts that deal with social dynamics. The problem of not getting long is not an “occult” problem, it is honestly a people problem. Christian sects do not get along. Social clicks in role playing games do not get along. Hell, Star Trek fans do not get along with Star Wars fans. The root of the problem does not rest with occultists but with a more human condition of group think, belonging,power over others and the need to conform. These issues intersect with charismatic individuals and a desire for power over others that actually has financial benefits. If you can create a cult of personality, and a cult of belonging with some sort of financial buy in, that is a well used business model. The goal then is to get your loyal supports to buy into a us versus them. That tendency is probably very close to a evolutionary imperative and probably a good reason why humans became the dominant species on earth. The occult market is a pool of attention and money that is small which produces a desperate clawing and dramatic broadcast through the internet prism of self-importance. In the grand scheme of things, we are talking about a very small group of people fighting in the same way as everyone else does using the actual Witch Wars. All fighting to build internal group importance toward an escapist view that those fights matter. They do not.

However, many people are so tied to their identity which is co-mingled with these groups and authors, that they have to fight like the devil. Not fighting would simply cause their self-identity and narrative to fall apart and that process is extremely painful. Increasingly, these fights often using the language of dogma and “the right way” do create financial and attention rewards for the people. We can see exactly the same patterns playing out at every level of society [JC: Whoa- he just summed up every dickhead-driven online argument about training in one paragraph].

Now to chaos magic being a unifying force. Hahahah, no chaos magic cannot be a unifying force now. In all honesty, almost every occult book and author is using principles from Chaos Magic. End stop. Those same authors and occultists heavily criticize and demonize chaos magic. Why?

Again, the best argument comes down to social dynamics. A meta approach to religion devests those religions and magical operations of the power of social control. If there is not one way to do things, there is a less coherent group. If there is a less coherent group, there is less social pressures and rewards of group belonging. Chaos magic threatens all that as well as the authority claims many practitioners would make to boost their drives for attention and money, If there may be no ultimate truth, once cannot rely on truth as your selling point and that limits how much you can use subjective experience or emotional appeals as well. You have your results and your experiences, both good and bad in chaos magic. The authoritarian glamour just falls apart as does any sense of absolute certainty. We should not underestimate how powerful that “righteous” feeling of certainty reinforced by group norms is.

Chaos magic by its nature, is purposefully rebellious and the methods of believe shifting force you to question even your own thoughts. As a therapist would say, don’t believe your own thinks. In some ways, that goes double for anyone making an authoritarian claim.

The beauty of the occult is in the process of actual magic starts to allow someone to actually start examining those very patterns of group and social pressures and decide to just choose something else. These are the social realities and many times they have teeth but that said, when you start to not be so tied to reality through results-orientated magic, a certain distance happens between you and your constraints, so can can give yourself the actual choice of whether to be defined by those patterns or become something. To me, that is the start of real freedom.

Q: That was without question the most succinct and insightful explanation for mechanisms behind just about any fractured subculture on the planet- as you said, it explains Star Wars vs. Star Trek, Mortal Kombat vs Street Fighter, and all of the incredibly fractious groups within the strength sports world. If my readership in particular takes nothing else from this interview, they absolutely should have had their ears perk up at that.

Speaking of the strength sports world and fitness (though I despise that word for a massive number of reasons) in general, you mentioned that you’ve recently undergone a massive weight loss. What’s that journey been like? Speaking only for myself I can say that I cannot even imagine what it takes to undergo that sort of thing, because you’ve got to unlearn such a long period of bad habits that righting the ship once you’re in a really tough spot physically has to take massive effort. And how did the occult play a role in what you’ve done so far? Were there any specific methods or techniques you would like to share that might have an application for my readership?

A: I do not believe in the type of narrative generally talked about in the public sphere. Weight loss and health is not about pull yourself up by your bootstraps. That lie keeps people down. First, you have to realize, in weight loss, you are your worst enemy but usually that enemy is not alone. Often, your friends, family, work are also not helpful. Because of my past history which includes extensive abuse as a child, health and weight will be a issue. My quest will never be complete. Once you conceive that somehow, you will get to a place of optimal health and everything will be ok, you have actually missed the process that actually might make it ok and thus lead toward health. Health lends some credence that things are internally going well, but there are many healthy people who are profoundly sick inside.

Hear me out. We like to think that weight issues are the person’s fault. They are usually not. Weight issues are a product of an individual that has a complex set of biochemical, environmental, and internal stimuli with very conflicting needs. The most magical thing a person can do, is decide to not be determined by those sets of conditions and then fight to like hell to maintain those realizations. Those kind of realizations really get to the heart of hermetic magic. Weight loss and health in general should be thought of as an endless journey as opposed to a result.

Why is the process so hard? Well first, yes we do have bad habits, but then even nutritional science gives very conflicting answers and eating right can be cost prohibitive depending on your situation. Work will often drain your energy you if you hate your job, and even the “societal” pressures to get healthy, can lead to a strong inner rebellion against the hidden bias. Trust me, if you are overweight, every single person will make sure you know and they will beat your self-esteem up for it in every chance they can. Those factors destroy people’s will power.

So the first step to weight loss, and really health is to work hard to realize, you are not your trauma and simply put, you do not have to be defined by those expectations. The step is to realize, while you can make changes, you must be compassionate to yourself. This is the great work of magic. To work to alchemize that trauma while you are trying to put in habits that are workable within your current life while embracing little by little becoming more awake of the patterns around you.

The second step, is truly aspirational goals and those are different for every person. For instance, I have stumbled recently and my goal may take me longer, but I want to bike from Cleveland, oh to Toronto. That’s over 300+ miles. I know it is possible but it is aspirationally inspiring. When I had more time, I went seriously and hard into martial arts. The health goal isn’t the aspirational goal, what you can do when achieve that your health enables is the aspirational goal.

In tactics, first honestly start off by doing self-compassion work while tracking your food. You have to really do self-compassion work and self-work because both other people, our culture and expectations will be hostile in actuality toward self-change. Those beautiful models are not present to help you, they are there to make you feel inadequate and depowered while offering the “magic” pill solution. Those solutions will not help with self-change. Magically anything that helps with self-healing will actually tend to move you a couple steps forward coupled with the aspirational goals. The self-compassion work will help you actually move slow and steady with more solid foundations as well as understanding the great journey you will take. I know self-compassion work might not seem “Hard Core”, but self-compassion work without self-delusion is some of the most powerful work you can do.

Second, small changes are often far more important than willpower tests or big rituals. When you throw magic, try to magic small changes such as just being inspired to walk more or even enchant for the energy just to be able to walk. Do other rituals in the forest, where you purposely have to hike a little. Bike over to the park where you will do the meditation. Take some deep meditative breaths when you get upset and do some sort of centering ( this actually short circuits many of our tendencies to eat comfort food when upset). Use walking meditations, or ways to incorporate meditation with exercise. Make your goals compassionately achievable and then work with some project management to make it happen. For magic, don’t ask the spirits to do this all for you, but ask them to help you stay inspired to keep making small changes.
Third, keep working toward progressive goals, enchanting and working for those progressing goals while continuing the self-compassion work. As the spiritual forces you are working with, to help you right size those progressive goals grounded in self-compassion work. The self-compassion work also lets you forgive yourself when there is a period of falling backwards.

Life happens, rise to it.

JL: Man- that was an epic closing statement. Although I have written a multi-part series entitled Your Fat Is Your Fault and I’m certainly not the most compassionate person (to myself or others), I completely agree in regards to the statement that any sort of exercise is not about the goal, but the journey itself (however trite and hackneyed that idea might be). In my experience, no matter how strong, jacked, or lean you get, there is always another mountain to climb once you ascend the one you considered the tallest. Some would suggest that idea is obsessive, but I think it is more of a matter of changing perspective when you achieve you goals. On the ground, people look like people, but from a mountain’s peak, they look like ants. Thus, what might have seemed like a huge and daunting task looks far easier in retrospect, and you then look to the next goal. The same could be said for really any pursuit, I think, with a motivated individual, from learning languages to lifting to being proficient in one occult medium or another.

And what you said regarding self-compassion is interesting, because I’ve always looked at it from the other perspective and sided with White Goodman on the subject of self improvement- your perceived defects are only your fault if you don’t hate yourself enough to do something about them. Frankly, I’d never even thought that self-improvement would arise out of compassion, so that is definitely something to consider (at least for people who aren’t borderline sociopaths, haha). You’ve definitely given us some mental cud on which we can proverbially chew for awhile.

And we’re going to wrap up this part of this absolute beast of an interview with Andrieh Vitmus there, but there is definitely going to be a part two. The insights he dropped in this were pants-shittingly profound, and I’m flattered that he took the time to hit us with the type of stuff that would make Yoda blink in amazement. Support the scene, people- this DIY shit is not as easy as you might think, and every little bit helps guys like us keep putting out the type of content that blows your proverbial skirt up and your fucking socks off. Show your appreciation by checking out his site here, his Facebook here, buying his stuff on Amazon here (and seriously, buy the shit- don’t steal it), and his Youtube here. Part 2 of this interview will be up as soon as it’s done, and in the meantime I’ll be rocking out with entries on the OG Westside Crew, an interview with Essential Heretic, hardcore legend, deathmatch wrestling beast, tattoo artist and all around fucking maniac Shlak, and likely some new recipe articles.

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