The Physics of Evocation

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THE PHYSICS OF EVOCATIONA Cthulhu Mythos perspective

by Phil HineINTRODUCTIONI feel that, rather than exploring l-ovecraftianthemes using traditional magical systelns such as theQabalah (though obviously, it may provide a usefulparallel), the most obvious place to look forguidelines is Lovecraft's fiction itself. From this, wefind that, for example, in The Dunwich Horror,lnvecraft clearly illustrates that ,hilltop rites,,associated with stone circles and strange geophysicalphenomena, are a key when approactring^entitiessuch as Yog-Sothoth. Bringing rhe Great 6ld Onesinto our dimension requires iome form of ,gate',which in mythos tales, is often a wild outdoor slte, astone circle, tower, or a similar type of power spot.l-ovecraft is also careful to point out that such siteshave, in historical terms, a long history of strangemanifestations associated with them. Again aiOagain, he places great emphasis on the folklore ofthose who live on the borders of such areas; that'locals' have traditions that the educated scepticsappearing in the tales scoff at.. . The theme of specific regions which have a longhistory of strange manifestations is well_doculmented. John Keel, in Strange Creatures From Time& S.pace, explores several cases involving themanifestation of strange beings that appear lo belocalized to a particular region. One example of thisis the 'Moth-man' sightings in West Virginia, whichoccuned between 7966-1968. Another aiea, perhapsof more interest to UK EOD initiates is Ilkley Moor,which has a long and well-documented hiitory ofstrange phenomena encountered, from ghosts andblack dogs to UFOs and what modern res-earchers inthe field_of Earth Mysreries call Earth Ligh*.- Thg Earth Ligtrts phenomenon has arisen largelyfrom the work of Paul Devereux, editor of The"LiyHunter and co-founder of The Dragon project. Histheories are drawn from the faci that the earthp.roduces a range of light-forms by natural processes.Th9s9 'unexplained' light-fbrms have been interpre_ted by those who encounter lhem as UFOs orspectral manifestations.FROM BUT-TERFLIES TO BEELZEBUBI am indebted to the work by Fra. Choronzon forhis.-lucid- exposition of Chaos Mathematics, espe_cially in its relation to magical entities. In an essayentitled 'Chaos Invocation', Fra. Choronzon (bitrade, a computer consultant) writes that:

We are all aware that information can be transfer_re.d from one place to another by modalatioi ofelectro--magnetic standing waves. I would like you toconsider.the possibility that information migit alsobe capable of storage or transfer within a taroidal(i.e. doyghnut-shaped) structure having an electro-magnetic character.Choronzon goes on to suggest that such orderedstructures arise quite naturally out of the ChaosMathematics which governs the behaviour of gasesand liquids. Probably the best-known exampl-e ofthis is the great Red Spot which appears in Jupiter,satmosphere. He gives the example of a blownsmoke-ring being such a structure, and goes on topoint out that it is conceivable that a non_smokercould equally well project a ring of gas from hislip, which could be established in thJ atmosphere,though its presence, by normal standards, would beimpossible to detect. Choronzon proposes that it ismathematically possible for such stiuctures, whichhave (at least in part) an electromagnetic character,to exist within the earth's magnetic field. He alsoproposes that it is possible to produce suchstructures by expending energy in the form ofneurochemical activity in the nervous system. Inshort,. physiological gnoses of the sort used bymagicians in ritual can produce such toroid strui-tures.The above has interesring implications for bbthmagicians and researchers into Earth Mysteries.Over the past year, I have been conducting a greatdeal of research into the creation, usige, *andaetiology of evoked entities, including both thedemonic forms of the Goetia and the ,ElementalServitors' created by magicians to perform a specific .task. In the latter case, lhe process is very much oneof creating an 'information matrix'; that is, of layingdown a set of instructions which define the naiure]abilities, and functions of the entity. Into thi;information matrix is projected energy, which formsthe entity as a whole, which is then able to act,independently of its creator. A purely psychologicaior subjective account of this process cannot accountfor the ability of such an eniity to manifest results(in accordance with the crealor's intent) in thephysical world.. Following Choronzon's ideas on Chaos Dyna-

mics, it seems likely to me that in evoking, and

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thereby creating, an elemental servitor, one could bebringing into existence a structure such as isoutlined above. If we can accept (at least in theory)that these structures are capable of retaining infor-mation over time, then we could be looking at apartial explanation for a wide range of phenomenaassociated with discrete 'spirits'. In my experience(and that of colleagues), the more 'work' that isgiven to an elemental servitor, the more 'powerful'it becomes - in terms of its ability to manipulateprobabilities, and eventually take on an independentcharacter of its own. It is not unknown for powerfulentities to survive the death of their creator. Themore people that 'create' such an entity alsoenhances its survival and capacity to store informa-tion. In these terms, it is easy to see how a smallspirit may, given time and the energy input (directedthrough ritual and other techniques for directingenergy) by enough people, could become what wecommonly assume to be 'gods'.Paul Devereux tentatively asserts the propositionthat Earth Light phenomena are consciousness-sensitive. That is, that the energy forms are sensitiveto the conscious mind of the obsewer. Manyaccounts of Earth Lights talk about the lightsfollowing the observer, playing 'tag' with them, orappear to display the characteristics of beingintelligently guided. This brings us back to magicalphenomena and Fra. Choronzon's 'Chaos Invoca-tion' theories. When creating (or evoking a spiritfrom a grimoire), we are focusing energy andbuilding an information matrix which, in turn,allows the energy to create a discrete entity whichbehaves within the limits of the information given -either the information which defines the characteris-tics of the entity, or the information given in thegrimoire. This process is similar (hough far moreintentional and directed) to the interaction between astrange phenomenon - an Earth Light, for example -and the individual who encounters it. 'Traditional'theories concerning the interaction between humanbeings and spirits time and time again recount theidea that spirits 'like' interacting with humansbecause we confer on them a property of individua-lity' that they do not inherently possess. I feel thatthere is a grain of truth in this view; that ourcapacity to organize and structure information intodiscrete wholes is a key feature in coming to gripswith this kind of experience. All magical pycho-cosms, such as Qabalah, Abra-Melin, etc, give aseries of instructions as to how entities summonedusing those structures behave.Bearing in mind Fra. Choronzon's ideas concern-ing the toroidal structures which are at least partiallyelectro-magnetic in character, I would say that it is

not beyond the bounds of possibility for such aphenomenon to be related to occurrences such asEarth Light encounters. If such an energy formresponds to (or stimulates) the human capacity tocreate an information matrix, or indeed if ourinteraction with the energy form produces as anemergent property a gestalt in accordance with eithera deliberately projected or an unconsciously formedidea of what the phenomenon is, then we are closeto arriving at a working methodology for accountingfor a wide range of occurrences. Drawing on Fra.Choronzon's work further, if we can accept that theenergy form, once given a structural definition by aninitial encounter with an individual or group ofindividuals, can retain that definition over time, thenit becomes possible to see how people can, duringan encounter 'flap' in a given region, report seeingsimilar manifestations. In short, the energy form,once given a structure, can retain this information,and feed it back to other individuals who sub-sequently interact it them.THE NEUROMANCER EFFECTA parallel phenomenon which fits this hypothesisis that of Channelling. In an essay entitled 'MoronsFrom Inner Space?: A Critical I-ook at ChannelledCommunications', I set out a possible account ofone of the processes possibly involved in thechannelling experience:An interesting model for examining inner-planecontacts can be found within Williarn Gibson'snovel, Neuromancer. One of the mnior characters isan Artificial Intelligence which manipulates a cast ofhumans to further its own ends. To successfully drtthis it must establish a rapport with those it wishesto manipulate. It daes this by generating constructs -personalities which it wears like masks, creatingthem out of the memories of the humans it wishes tocontact. It explains that it needs these masks toestablish a point of access - an interface - betweenits own experience and the perceptual limits ofhuman beings.Dion Fortune made extensive use of inner-planecontacts to synthesize her magical ideas. AlanRichardson, in his biography of Dion Fortune,Priestess, discusses the various historical figures thatFortune claimed to be in contact with. The mostinteresting entity is one 'David Carsons', whoaccording to Fortune was a young British officerwho was killed during the first World War. Fortuneprovided a good deal of biographical informationconcerning Carsons, and after thorough research,Alan Richardson states that Carsons did not exist!Rather, it seems, he was actually, in terms of theabove model, a construct; a personality generatedout of Dion Fortune's experimental magick and

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wexperiences, and hence an interface for accessinginformation. If you imagine the sum total of yourpersonal memories and knowledge as a sphere inspace - the unknown - then to extend your sphere ofinformation it is as though a window must becreated, through which the unknown, or raw data,can be translated into information that is meaningfulin terms of perceptual limitations. Inner-planeentities are how we tend to conceptualize thesewindows into chaos. They appear as independententities so that we can make sense of the incomingdata. Their personalities are usually concurrent witfithe recipient's belief system. Hence the many formsof the entities, depending on where you believe theseat of wisdom is, be it Egypt, Sirius B, or somedraughty monastery in Tibet. Usually, it seems,these entities are automatically generated as onefocuses will and imagination towards any onevector, but occasionally entities can be generated asan act of will, so that 'outposts' can be establishedwithin which personal ideas and inner worlds can be

explored and eventually integrated into one's psy-chocosm. At this point the whole issue of the'reality' of the experience breaks down, as theseentities are not simply 'secondary personalities' inthe pathological sense, but constructs which areemergent properties of our information-processingcapacity interacting with that which lies beyond it.It strikes me that the above account is also truefor a wide range of magical phenomena connectedwith spirit contacts - that the human tendency torelate to all things as though they are discretephenomena (surely a property of how our brainsorganize information) enables us to generate 'masks,or personae upon the energy forms we are encoun-tering. Channelled communications from entities areoften a by-product of UFO experiences as well aspychic encounters. It may well be that ourinteraction with energy forms gives rise to suchconstructs - that masks are created and retained bythe energy structures, not from any kind ofself-referential intelligence on the part of the Earth

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Lights, but from the principle (from SystemsTheory) that some energy forms are attractedtowards structures of higher cohesiveness, such asthe information field generated by the human brain,or possibly the electro-magnetic field generated bycars, power lines, etc.Ai of which leads us slowly back to StoneCircles, I-ovecraft's 'frenzied rites on the hilltops',and the role that sound plays in all of this. There is agreat deal of magical literature available exploringihe dynamics of sound, particularly different vocaltechniques used to produce an Altered State ofC-onsciousness (ASC). One of the key factors seemsto be rhythm. Rhythms calry our consciousnessalong, from heartbeats, to cycles of breathing,sleeping, night-day and the passage of seasons.rurytfrms promote associated body movements andadjustments, and act as a signal to begin movementwiihout conscious effort, so that less energy isexpended when you begin; for example, it has beenshown that soldiers can march further, and in betterform, with less fatigue, when accompanied by amarching band. The feeling of being 'carried' comesfrom the structure that rhythm gives to our time-sense, and the pattern gives a sense of continuance.It becomes a motor attitude, and one's attention isfreed (if this is desired). Rhythms also become'mirrored' by our brain activity, and they havepowerful physiological effects on us' Music Therap-ists harre found that people suffering from Aphasiaor Huntingdon's Chorea (both neurological disorderswhich impair speech) can carry a tune, and groupsinging is a common element in therapeutic voicetraining.Anthropologists have done a great deal of workexamining the role that music plays in hallucino-genic joulneys. The presence of music as a ritualaccessory to hallucinogenic drug use can be obser-ved on a wide cross-cultural base. Marlene DobkinDe Rios, in her book Hallucinogens: A Cross-Culnral Perspective, suggests that the ritualized useof music within hallucinogenic journeys helps theshaman 'leading' such an experience to provide astructure with which to point participants towardssignificant experiences within the trip. This is alsoseen in Voudoun, where specific drumming ritualsannounce the manifestation of particular I.oa' Whatis obvious from this is that sound imposes astructure onto experience, in particular, with regardto Time-sense. Of which, more later.Returning to Fra. Choronzon's work on ChaosInvocation, he notes the use of a 'pulse of sound'injected into the space occupied by one of thetoioidal structures he describes by which theinformation matrix is transferred to the structure.

The forceful enunciation of sound, whether it beEnochian Calls, Primal Speech, or Barbarous Wordsof Evocation, of necessity produces an ASC, astechniques such as these lead to hyperventilation,increas-ed brain activity, tachycardia, etc. It iswell-accepted by magicians and mystics that 'soundcarries thought' and that for advanced practitioners,vocalisation is not a necessity for the ritual (orwhatever) to be efficacious. What is important, isthe focusing of awareness along a particular vector,and the entry into an ASC where the practitioner canfocus attention intensely towards a single point andproject it forth.- The relationship between sound and sacred sitesis also being researched, again by Paul Devereux.The 'hill noises' of The Dunwich Horror have beenreported occasionally as emanating from the localityof sacred sites,


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come in, well, we could speculate far and wide.That we may be much more sensitive to a widerrange of fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field isbecoming more and morc acceptable to science. TheAmerican researcher, Michael Persinger, has putforward the view that there is a link between someforms of psi activity and fluctuations in the earth'smagnetic field. It has been also suggested that partof the Hippocampus region of the brain senses, anddistributes to other brain areas, information aboutelectromagnetic fields. Persinger's work appears tovalidate two points; firstly, that the brain cangenerate electro-magnetic energy, and secondly, thatexternal sources of electro-magnetic energy canaffect brain function, giving rise to a wide variety of'experienced' phenomena. If we can accept this (andthere is a growing body of research that bears thisout), then suddenly Fra. Choronzon's ideas aboutelectro-magnetic structures which have the capacityto order themselves by, and retain information overtime, don't sound so far-fetched, do they?C-oming back to the Cthulhu Mythos, it seemsthen that l-ovecraft was on the right track with histhemes of weird hill-regions, stone circles, barbarouswords of power, and 'frenzied rites'. The work ofPaul Devereux and other researchers points to theconclusion that some sacred sites at least, are powerspots which predisposed the users towards obtainingan ASC whereby they could interact with energyforms of an electro-magnetic nature, doubtless aidedby Earth Light manifestations and hallucinogenicsubstances. Earth Mysteries researcher Paul Bennetthas noted that in Britain, as in many other places, avariety of plants which have hallucinogenic proper-ties can be found growing near to sacred sites. Themagical dynamics of sound are also a factor, interms of both the psycho-physical effects upon theparticipants, and the effect upon external energysources.As to the entity Yog-Sothoth, whose appearancein the Mythos triggered this lengrhy chain ofsynthesis; some modern magicians, notably thosedrawing heavily upon the ideas of Kenneth Grant,have drawn a parallel between Yog-Sothoth and thedemon Choronzon, evoked by Aleister Crowley andVictor Neuburg in the Sahara Desert. Again, TheDunwich Horror provides us with a key passage:The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the OldOnes shall be, not in the spaces we know, butbetween them. They walk serene and primal,undimensioneQ and to us unseen. Yog-Sothothknows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothothis the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present,future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows wherethe Old Ones broke through of olQ and where they

shall break through again. ...They walk unseen anrJfoul in lonely places where the Words have beenspoken and the Rites howled through at theirSeasons. The wind gibbers with their voir:es and theearth mutters with their consciousness.This passage brings to mind the 'timeslip'phenomena discussed above. What is equally, if notmore interesting in the light (no pun intended) of thepresent discussion is that in other Mythos tales,Yog-sothoth is described as a conglomerate ofiridescent globes - in other words, a light formphenomenon! The entity is also associated withstrange atmospheric effects such as freak winds andstorms (l,ovecraft is known to have carefully relatedsome of his fictional events with floods, earth-quakes, and other such occurrences). To me, thisstresses further the validity of Lovecraft's dream-inspired fiction as a valid source of magical ideas.The guidelines to evoking Yog-Sothoth appear, atleast as far as The Dunwich Horror sets them forth,to be quite clear and operationally valid. Investiga-tion of the entity has (in my view) suffered from thenegative connotations of association with Choronzonas an entity of dispersal, or 'negative' chaos. Theemerging science of Chaos Dynamics can perhapsafford us a more positive viewpoint, and the linkbetween Mythos entities and the Mandelbrot Set hasalready been noted by EOD initiates. From theforegoing, I would suggest that Yog-Sothoth is quitepossibly a kind of 'guide' entity that appears in

many cultures as the 'guardian' of the underworldentered through ASC-s, though one which is capableof manifesting as a series, perhaps, of electro-magnetic phenomena. The entity which coheres inthe form we understand as Yog-Sothoth is a'window' into the darkness of the unknown, andperhaps by creating interfaces, or personae, throughwhich we may glean information, we can attainfurther insights into the way we interact with ouruniverse. Having theorized thus far, what onlyremains is to go forth and evoke!REFERENCESPaul Dever eux - Earth Lights Revelation, Places ofPowerFra. Choronzon - Chaos Invocation, Liber CyberH.P. l-ovecraft - The Dunwich HorrorJohn Keel - Strange Creatures From Time & SpaceMarlene Dobkin De Rios - Hallucinogens: Cross-Culural Perspectives

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The Physics of Evocation