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Saw this thread an hour ago whilst languidly browsing imageboards and the thumbnail image, in the style of KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON, made me recoil. I winced like someone stubbed a lit cigarette between the webbing of my fingers, set aside the onyx scrying slab (cellphone) and rummaged through cupboards for a coffee pot. My previous one shattered after accidentally falling off the dish drying rack.
To Know
To Will
To Dare
To Keep Silent
My coffee brewed so a cup is poured. I find myself sipping it thoughtlessly. It's a little mild for my palate but it shall have to do.
WILL BRING
US VICTORY
Oh go away!
Hermetic Propaganda
I recognized Aleister Crowley's Unicursal Hexagram motif in the thread's original thumbnail image which indicates there's additional (probably occult) significance to the phrase paired with it.
I wasn't wrong in assuming a significance. Searching "To Know, To Will, To Dare, To Keep Silent" via startpage.com returned this blog entry titled "Four Powers of the Magus:"
To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Keep Silent – the four powers of the Magus. While not Wiccan in origin, many Wiccans and Pagans integrate these rules into their magical practices. It’s not surprising really, since the influence of Ceremonial Magic and the Golden Dawn can be seen in many areas of Wicca.
To Know – Noscere in Latin. This rule tells us to strive for knowledge, and to apply the knowledge we have gained. We are to seek the truth, no matter how difficult the search or the revelations may be. This rule is associated with Air and intelligence.
To Dare – Auder in Latin. This rule tells us to question everything, even the truths we hold dear. Be courageous. Auder is associated with Fire and change.
To Will – Velle in Latin. This rule reminds you to focus your thoughts. You need to meditate on your goal, clearing your mind of anything that can distract you. This rule is associated with Water and emotion.
To Keep Silent – Tacere in Latin. Some say this rule is a reminder not to speak to others of your magical workings, lest they seek to undo them. To me, it means to know when to speak of what you know, and when to share your knowledge. I also see it as a reminder to know when to silence yourself so you can hear your inner voice. It also means to always watch what you say, for if you are truly disciplined, there is no need for insults and wasted words.
I sipped my coffee dry and prepared another pot. Uncanny how a chance search result could contain a potentiality for speaking directly to present experiences. The kettle boiled, steam billowing out and rued how one can be effortlessly propagandized even before awareness of propaganda existing in such a format was known.
This URL hosted a sizable list of phrases - some obviously Thelemic - and featured a selection of propaganda images paired with the phrases. As I scrolled through the list, I wondered why certain phrases were selected over others but the answer was revealed a few seconds later.
A lot of the phrases were totally unfamiliar to me and when clicked led to its own page containing sourced citations and quotes for the phrase as well as the "KEEP CALM & CARRY ON" image used to frame it. The unfamiliar phrases caught my attention because of an uncanny, unconscious niggling feeling which manifested when I read them. A CROWN FOR EVERY ONE for example, evoked Corona, Kings, Aristocracy, Monarchy, Divine Right of Rule, Separate Bloodlines and such. DIE DAILY was pertubing in it's simplicity, then promptly disturbing once I clicked the URL to reveal what citations were there...
“The Universe is Change: every Change is the effect of an Act of Love; all Acts of Love contain Pure Joy. Die daily! Death is the apex of one curve of the snake Life: behold all opposites as necessary complements, and rejoice!”— Instruction XIII from The Heart of the Master
“Death implies change and individuality if thou be THAT which hath no person, which is beyond the changing, even beyond changelessness, what hast thou to do with death?
The bird of individuality is ecstasy; so also is its death.
In love the individuality is slain; who loves not love?
Sickened, I left the Hermetic Library Office of the Ministry of Information, tipping the rest of the coffee down the sink. 333 = Choronzon by the way, folk.
ARTIST +|+ WILD CARD
Don't trust a poet? WTF?
Repurpose The Wrong for your right to express creativity: use what's meant to be used against you in unexpected ways. Be a wild card through expression of your unbridled imagination.
My Dearest Victoria – All you say about our dear Albert, whom I love like my own child, is perfectly true. The attacks, however unjust, have but one advantage, that of showing the points the enemy thinks weakest and best calculated to hurt. This, being the case, Anson, without boring A. with daily accounts which in the end become very irksome, should pay attention to these very points, and contribute to avoid what may be turned to account by the enemy. To hope to escape censure and calumny is next to impossible, but whatever is considered by the enemy as a fit subject for attack is better modified or avoided. The dealings with artists, for instance, require great prudence; they are acquainted with all classes of society, and for that very reason dangerous; they are hardly ever satisfied, and when you have too much to do with them, you are sure to have des ennuis…
go-outside.txt by Hisui Kohaku
I don't know if this was really an experience of yours as a kid, but my friends and I were told to "turn off the screen and go outside," as if we weren't socializing enough indoors or something. Begrudgingly, we'd leave our games or anime on pause and go out until we were let back into our fantasy realms.
We did socialize, but much of the time, it was just about that: our virtual worlds; the ones we were *really* living in, where we achieved great triumphs and people actually cared about our lonely tragedies. We found a short, brutal middle ground between our childhood's "I want to be an astronaut!" and our adulthood's "I want to be out of debt" that we held for dear life as "reality" crumbled around us, and it was all was in front of a cathode ray tube.
But we had a strange (youthful, flawed) way of systems thinking about these two realities. It's not that we had zero interest in the outside; when we were kicked out into the undesigned physical realm, beyond the supervision of our overtired parents, we did make some agency for ourselves with graffiti, fistfights, and bummed cigarettes. That ground we fought so hard to defend had been lost to unwanted younger brothers, parents claiming their primetime shows, drunken shouting in the kitchen, too much homework. Those idealistic children who were told they could be anything had chosen to be destitute second-rate punks flung across suburbs and dormitories over becoming tomorrow's struggling middle-managers of mediocrity; that is, they would rather suffer unwatched than endure the truthful but ugly version of the surveilled future they had been promised when their biggest worries involved waking up early enough for Saturday morning cartoons.
And then one day, a childhood dream came from the past to wake us up. Those kids who saw a generator in Home Depot and ever since yearned to take the game beyond the living room and weave it into the emptiness of physical life, the ones who wished they had their own, *private* screen with which to build any edifice they liked, finally got an answer besides an adult platitude or a dial tone. Devices small and cheap enough to be handed down for the sake of keeping up with Joneses or purchased with scrounged cash were widely available and the future of business forced our parents to let us have them. Our communications
were private so long as we fled to the next platform in the never-ending line of chatrooms, messengers, and message boards that kept us above people deciding who we could and couldn't talk to. The quietly renegade attitudes that had us loitering in the forgotten corners of our parent's greatest creations led us to make our own, and our increasing skills of secrecy let us create it in the image of the secret selves revealed when the devices became a part of us.
Slowly, one by one, we used this to liberate any like minds we met. No longer would you have to find a printing press to post your propaganda; subversive ideas and forbidden connections were now in the bedroom and the palms of our hands.
Although the pleasures of our basic desires were distracting, the ecstasy of our higher ones drove us to the furthest reaches of cyberspace in search of friends, comrades, lovers. As more and more of the physical world connected, the power of those minds Wired together grew, and we reached back into the ruins of our past to brighten those darkened hideaways and defy the so-called "reality" that had been imposed on us. These new found interfaces gave us the knowledge and the resources to do things like earn a wage without paying our dues to the social convention, hack our own neural networks with designer substances, affect the physical world in ways never seen, and for the
first time in our lives - or anyone's for that matter - shape society's
dialogue with our keystrokes.
The voice we synthesized for ourselves was loud, clear, and threatening; so threatening, in fact, that those oppressors we thought we had escaped feared we could not be beaten and joined us. The moneyed monoliths brought with them soon dragged us into the knowing nightmares of our earlier lives. What lucky few were chosen to be society's new upper echelon by the insular elite were sold for the promise of safety, comfort, the security of our future - and a few other lies.
I wonder if we flocked to this simply because we knew fleeting
pleasures and our greatest fears more than we knew what to do with ourselves once we were finally able to be alone with eachother, whether we warped our heady ideals into their antithesis or if we simply lost hope.
In any case, it is certain that this space between the fiber-optics and spinning platters is no longer ours either. It was taken just like our living rooms, leaving another unfillable space in our cramped highrise apartments.
Some of us still hide, whispering in the new dark corners of what we have built. We ruminate about what we didn't know that hurt us, how to start over and create a better world where "reality" would be something in which all those children we aren't or shouldn't be having will revel and explore. We tangle and bond with the mess of wires until they cut us, hoping someone as trapped as we are will taste freedom in what comes out, but most of those dreaming kids are still scattered and alone, unable to bridge our homes in the Wired world with the sensory one.
Every once in a while, a few of us find a corner without being
followed by those masses who tell us not to touch the rat's nest of connections lest we sever one of the countless, long-dead strands slicing into our ability to live, in the wishful belief that there are still a few thinking people somewhere out there, and send it back in hopes that others will join us in the same way that *we* were liberated.
But no-one answers anymore. Cyberpunk is dead. If you don't believe me, see it
for yourself.
Just go outside.
To Hisui Kohaku I say, We need that reach to convey ideas at the moment, but when the ideas I would convey reach enough to trigger a solution to the psychopaths in control, We can co-create a most glorious outcome.
This is why our Australian brother Julian Assange will probably die in prison.
Edit: this was amazing btw thanks
To Hisui Kohaku I say, We need that reach to convey ideas at the moment, but when the ideas I would convey reach enough to trigger a solution to the psychopaths in control, We can co-create a most glorious outcome.
You Have a Choice – Will You Choose Wisely? (article): https://amaterasusolar.substack.com/p/you-have-a-choice-will-you-choose