Thoughts on the mind, magic, writing, language, art, philosophy, psychology, culture and just about everything I suppose. Or, who am I kidding, this is probably some kind of fiction too. Some longer and more coherent thoughts, some short random ideas.
You are like
a beautiful sunrise
and you’ve got
three apples.
You give one to me,
and eat one yourself.
How many apples
remain when sunset
separates us
with darkness?
We only use second person narration in poetry and math problems. Is there some kind of hidden connection?
“Learn from the past and deal with any bad things rather than avoid it. Then move on. Stop returning and dwelling, because it keeps you from moving on. To me the past feels more and more like distant backstory that mostly isn’t relevant anymore. I have become someone else now.”
This name, Ellinor Kall, started as an escape, the revealing of an inner secret, as an exploration of myself. Along the years it grew and took on it’s own life. It made me write and act more spontaneous. I didn’t have to care about what those who knew the previous me would think. It made me free.
I connected with people that didn’t care who I had been, they became friends with who I was now. I realized that this name was as true as the other one I have. My alias became me. I let my sides do different things, even preferred different languages depending on who was up front.
For a couple of years I’ve tried to physically manifest my new self in actual reality. Changing my appearance bit by bit, mostly by clothing, nails and some makeup. It alternately brought me comfort and despair, ultimately draining my energy. I’ve been in a civil war with my body.
My inner selves and my body are different. I have come to accept that now. I’ve made a peace treaty with my body. I’ll stop disliking my body, treat it with respect, exercise it and use it to do things we both enjoy instead of retreating into my mind and only using it for transport.
I can be who I am without changing the body I live in. The clothes I wear doesn’t validate me. I can wear high heels or heavy hiking boots. I can be both me and me at the same time, just as easily as I can be both a writer and a reader. I can change appearance based on mood and feelings. I can be fluid on both inside and outside.
I’m Ellinor and I’m […]. I’m a writer, musician and magician. I’m liminal, demi-fictional, a positive nihilist, queer, non-binary, genderfluid, an extranousician and a secret oracle. I travel through and explore both fiction and reality. And by my will – I do what I darn well please!
On the troubles of being a binary star…
I separated Ellinor from M when online as a way to explore her as an aspect of myself without the burden of the connotations M brought with him. Now I feel that I want to consolidate. I’m not two separate entities, it’s just two non-binary aspects of one core.
I was born with the body of M. But I’ve always had Ellinor within me. Sometimes she is stronger and takes over the stage and sometimes she stays at home under a blanket with a book while M goes to work. Poor M, he doesn’t want to leave her, none of them likes a job where they have to follow orders and rules.
Ellinor is not just a persona of M. She has her own will, her own mood, her own way of expressing, her own way of writing and interacting with people. She is both stronger and more vulnerable. She has impetus, she is restless and sometimes hypomanic.
M is not the real Ellinor. He is just an aspect of her. Often conditioned by society into a role. He often feels he’s playing a character, putting up a fascade, and he often gets genuinely surprised when he sees himself in a mirror. Sometimes he feels like nothing. Like his task is just to carry a body from A to B.
Sometimes E hates that she looks like M. Sometimes M hates that he feels like E. Sometimes they get along and work marvels. Their wills wax and wane, their interests overlap, and both like writing. Maybe M would like to let go of the selfcontrol, which also makes him prone to judge himself and other, while E is more dominant with a greater kindness who sees mercy beyond the obstacles.
And still – it’s all me.
It was Midsummers Eve, the great heathen celebration of the fallic shape of Scandinavia, and Ellinor was invited by a friend to a small backyard party in a somewhat shady suburb for beer and some kind of grilled, or rather charred, meat referred to only as “fleisch”.
She wasn’t used to socializing with humans and got off on the wrong foot already when she before leaving home realized she hated almost all of her clothes and couldn’t get into the ones she still liked because she had gained too much weight during her recent months under the surface in a low mood cycle of her undiagnosed bipolar-like syndrome.
The people at the party were very nice. But she found herself thinking mostly about her writing, how she was losing so many hours of writing time, how this extra day off from work could have yielded at least a thousand words.
The music was good, mostly metal, but she thought about the poor neighbours having to live with the hosts speakers and hifi-system. The speakers were so tall that she could stand straight next to one and rest her nose on the top of it.
The beer made her tired and the boys in charge of food had only bought the fleisch and some candy to eat. Only. A smörgåsbord of meat, candy and beer. And vodka of course, this was taking place in Sweden, on Midsummer’s Eve, what do you expect?
Some time after midnight, still dressed in clothes she hated, she excused herself and caught a late bus home. No fertility rituals or sexual celebrations for her this year. No dancing around the midsummer pole. The closest thing was a faint hint of fetish feeling for the black rain jacket she wore to not freeze to death while waiting for the bus.
When she finally got home she quickly fell asleep without flowers under her pillow as tradition usually edicts. And so another year passes without carnality. It’s all good. Her vow to be a writer-nun still valid. Well, except that one time just before Christmas. Oh, and the thing this spring. Damn. Neither of them counts!
I just had an interesting experience. I was awakedreaming reality. I was incredibly tired this afternoon and laid down in my sofa to rest a bit. Closed my eyes but didn’t fall asleep. I went into that state of mind where you are aware of the surroundings and the sound, but your connection to the body is getting fluid. I thought about various things and then started to dream while still conscious.
I was dreaming that I saw exactly what I should see if I opened my eyes. I felt my eyes being closed but yet I saw my living room in front of me, clearly and vividly, as if my eyes had been open. After a few seconds the phenomena disappeared and I opened my eyes. The angle, field of view and the light in the room was slightly different but it was no difference in how real what I had dreamt and what I now saw with my eyes was. The dream and reality was equally real.
The brain is constantly creating its perception of actual reality in our minds whether the impressions are gathered externally, from our senses, or internally, from our dreams and imagination. This creation of the world doesn’t stop when we are sleeping, the brain never shut down, only our selves. We are always the same corporeal entity, whether we are sleeping or awake, as the conscious or unconscious I is only one of many parts that is us.
Our brains perception of actual reality, what we call existence, is one single continuous dream, as long as the span of our lives.
In the light of deeper insight I need to nuance my earlier writing about the percieved unrealness of reality and how the existence of alternative realities really works.
There is only one reality: The actual reality that is everywhere. The phenomenal world where actions take place, where matter and energy interact, where there are distances and passing time.
Any perceived variations and alternatives to actual reality are just different interpretations in our creative minds due to perspective, relativity, lack of or erroneous information, state of mind, substances, art, culture, etc. What we experience are models – the brains best guess of what is going on.
These variations manifest as multitudes of sub-realities, like bubbles, overlapping or separate layers of perception, inside actual reality. They are readily created wherever there are one or more consciousnesses present and can be personal, shared or both. Actual reality is a frothing foam of sub-bubbles.
However, no matter how real, alternative or separate these sub-realities seem, our minds, which is where they exist, are still a part of the one fundamental, all-encompassing actual reality. Like any fictitious scene performed on a stage, it is still done in reality, inside a real theater building. Fiction is as real as reality.
Naked reality is unreachable to us. We’re prodding and probing it, measuring and calculating it’s features, and from these results we know that it’s actually there. But to our conscious minds it’s hidden behind a veil of math and language. To us it appears uncertain, abstruse and ineffable, like a god.
And if reality itself is the creating force rather than the created: How do we raise our eyes from the details we study? How do we connect the pieces to see the entire countenance? How can we see the actual reality behind the veil and fathom it’s all encompassing splendor?
There is only one reality. But within it – a myriad of perspectives.
Learn, forget, explore, remember.
I just realized that I have navigated off the charts now. That’s why the old maps don’t appeal to me anymore. I have to draw my own henceforth.
I wore boy-shirts for the first time in a couple of years this winter. Something fluid shifted late autumn after reaching the Sun. The Mercurial sign became dominant. I went in between. I had some unfinished creative business to take care of. I revisited myself as I was to wrap it up and felt that I still knew that person.
I’ve been trying how far from the original schematics I feel comfortable to go and had to pull back a bit and assess my findings. Even the eager explorer sometimes needs to regroup at basecamp. The more common path is not mine to thread, it never was.
After some healthy doubt I now feel invigorated. I’m doing maintenance on my gear and have started drawing possible routes on my maps. I’ve set my eyes on a new mountain top.
The only sin is blocking. To block is to hinder someone else doing something. Could be drastic: killing them and blocking them from living. Or minor: saying something negative and blocking them from their good mood. Ruining things for others to gain yourself is the Sin of Blocking.
Why is the chanting of children’s rhymes so suggestive and frequently used in horror movies? The innocence of the often mundane words, repeated mechanically, is a magical chant that appears to possess the children. They become something else, they look like children but are controlled by unseen forces through the recital of the rhyme. Through this external influence they become unpredictable and therefore frightening.
I almost said goodbye to creativity this Sunday. I wanted to quit writing, sign off from being Ellinor, stop philosophizing about magic/art. I was overwhelmed by all the overlapping realities I carried in my head and got another almost-panic-attack while taking a walk. About to faint I sat on a bench down by the river where I live and imagined that I was a gardener tending a garden.
But the thing is: I am a writer, I am Ellinor and I always think about creating things. Why did I feel so strongly against it? I didn’t doubt myself. I doubted the sanity of getting too deep into all these created realities. I doubted the sanity in feeling that negative forces were leaking out of my writing into reality. I doubted the sanity in who I have become. It was too much chaos and not enough control.
What is real, what is pretend? When trying to take a break from it all I realized how much of our human lives take place in realities outside the actual reality. Our society, culture, books, tv-series, social media, etc – all layers of reality that is very difficult to detox from. I got to work on Monday and went straight into the reality of animating a motion graphics video. No escape. But do I really need an escape?
I got home the same Monday. Opened the manuscript I was working on when my brain went into chaos mode. And continued writing. I logged into Twitter to write about my intended break. On Tuesday I did an audio recording of an insane 3.5 minute sermon based on a text about magic I had written previously. And today it’s Wednesday and I’m back here to write about it all. And I love it. This is who I am.
Imagination, writing, art – the consciousness can do powerful stuff. There is no white or black magic/art, but magic/art can definitely be positive or negative so we better know what we’re doing. As writers or magicians, call it what you will, we must direct and ride the currents without getting caught up in them. Take a step back and assess the situation once in a while. Remember not to dive head first into too deep water without checking for sharks first.
And when chaos hits your mind – just imagine being a gardener.
I’m not sure I should be writing about fucking when in fact I am the fucking. Oups, did I say fucking? I meant magic of course. I am the fucking magic.
// Ellinor Kali (sic), The Oracle with the Sharpened Teeth, heading for Geburah, which is too Marsy for me as I am, I need to swim the fluid, maybe I could try to close a loop in the process, while writing incomprehensible gibberish about a grain of sand that is itching and needs to be isolated, layer by layer until it is no longer… well, it’s a pearl, so much for the high initiation of the mystery of the Goddess of Digressions…
I recently finished reading two odd books that had taken an unusually long time to get through. As I wrote a review for one of them (Cyclonopedia) I realized that the review could as well have been written for the other one (Jerusalem). So, without further ado, two very different books, but exactly the same review.
Cyclonopedia (Reza Negarestani) and/or Jerusalem (Alan Moore)
Intriguing and exhausting, a mouthful and hollow, an artifact of art disguised as logic and reason, an extreme twist of thought with its own purpose, consciously bombarding the unconscious not with a message but with a state of mind. Sometimes you skip a few words, or paragraphs, bored or saturated, as there is no end in sight. It’s compelling content is not genius of thought, but an equilibrism of complex construction. As pretentious as every single work of art. The words mean nothing unless you want them to; the experience is all. And I really enjoyed the experience of nearly going insane. Highly recommended – with caution!
Addendum: Jerusalem, which is very different from Cyclonopeida, took me over two years to finish. It’s both good and boring. The endless descriptions of Northampton was making me angry. But still it was intriguing. The most experimental thing Moore could do now is to write an ordinary 250-page straight story. Please.
My muse always hit me with stuff when I’m the most busy with something else. ALWAYS. It’s like the subconscious needs the speed of the consciousness to be triggered. Like: “Oh, shit, she is productive, I better do something to look good too! Here, have an idea! Or ten! How’s that for being productive, huh?”
I feel abrupted. Well, it definitely should be a word like that. A constant feeling of interruptions that disrupts my mind. Leaving no room for thoughts to fully form. It’s a cut-down technique producing gibberish and longing for coherence.
You don’t really have a name. It isn’t inherent in the essence of a human. It’s just arbitrary sounds your parents made up as a reference to you and to get your attention. Names define things and summons people when spoken – and are as such a kind of spell.
There is a lot of truth in that you have power over someone if you know their name. How much power does your name hold over you? Is it possible to take control over the spelling of your name and thus change yourself? Or to shed that influence entirely by becoming nameless?
Names can be used as spells to inflict discomfort and pain. Mispronounced, distorted on purpose, or a name or epithet you find wrong or degrading. And you can literally destroy someone by using their deadname (name from before a gender transition).
The power of names can of course also be harnessed for benign purposes. By taking control of what you are called you can influence both how others and yourself perceive who you are. A magician could find many uses for magical aliases as they sets your mind and the minds of others in a certain, chosen state. A well constructed alias or epithet is similar to a mask changing your persona. You become different.
A way of intentionally causing change in yourself is if you very subtly but constantly refer to yourself as for example “The Author”. Everyone around you will come to adapt that eventually and you’ll be known in their minds as “The Author”. I call this effect “mirroring yourself” since you create a desired image of yourself in the minds of others and when they reflect this upon you it will reificate the change in yourself that you strive for.
So in essence: If we name something it is instantly changed, it’s made real or changed in some way. An alteration of reality. Names are a strong magical tool that can be used for creative and destructive purposes. Be careful how you name people.
Why do the calls of the Aethyrs work better in Enochian?
Scientists believed for a long time that the Akkadians had invented a secret cipher to write about magic and religion since those texts were not written in the Akkadian language. Then they realized that it was written in the much older, and up until then unknown, Sumerian language. For some reason the older language had been preserved for ritual and magic purposes.
Many years later the Christian church used Latin in their bibles and masses for a long time even though the use of languages changed and ordinary people didn’t understand a word of it. Even now, long after it finally was translated, everyone still prefers the archaic language in the old bible translations over the later, more modern translations. And of course popular media still uses Latin to depict spells and magic. Sigils could maybe be seen as an extreme of this as it is writing that becomes unintelligible on purpose.
Much of the occult currents from the last centuries used the Hebrew letters language a basis for many magical systems, for instance Hermetic Kabbalah and Tarot, although none of the practitioners spoke it as first language, in fact it was near extinct until it was revived in the 19th century. Inherent in the Hebrew letters are the numbers used in Gematria and the endless mathematical computations, often very abstruse, are abundant in occult literature.
I write both fiction and these essays in English despite my native language being Swedish. Why? Well, the simple reason is that it sets my mind in another state. It forces me to think in another way and kind of elevates me into a heightened state of writing. More focused, somehow. Using a different language distances me from the feeling of the banal and mundane that my first language gives when I try to write about magic. It makes me into another writer than I am when writing in Swedish.
The same phenomena is found in music. Sweden has a lot of musicians that sing in English instead of Swedish. Not to get an international career, but just because they think it suits the music better singing in English. I also do this with my band. I tried to write Swedish lyrics with the same topics as usual, but then it felt like it was written for a different band and I eventually made it a solo-album.
Writing in different languages have inherent differences that makes you think in different ways. To the Germans the Sun is feminine and the Moon masculine. That affects what you think they symbolize and how you describe them in writing. There is an African language that don’t describe directions as left or right. They use south of, or north of, etc, for everything. That makes them subconsciously very aware of the orientation of directions at all times. And so on.
So, there are several parts to this: The language itself, how it makes you think and feel and a distancing from the ordinary may be some key elements to why we as humans appear to use older language for our magic, spells and our beliefs.
Chanting the calls of the Aethyrs in Enochian is a more effective way of putting yourself in the right state of mind to work your magic.