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Anthony Alvarado

Anthony Alvarado

Category Archives: Magic

The Magic Hour: Ayahuasca, Tarot, and Yoga Koshas

13 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by Alvarado in Magic, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Ayahuasca, Coleman Stevenson, Kathleen, Psychedelics, Raj Patra, tarot, The Magic Hour, xray, yoga, Yoga Matters

Here is an exciting new episode of The Magic Hour, as featured monthly on 91.1 XRAY FM, Portland, Oregon. Featuring 3 different guests, first I talk to Kathleen about her experiences taking the psychedelic plant medicine Ayahuasca. Next up we talk with Coleman Stevenson about Tarot and the deck she designed. And we debut a new feature, talking with Raj Patra, called Yoga Matters— where Raj tackles the question “what does it mean to be a human being?”

You can download the full episode from the link here:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/themagichour/Kathleen-Coleman_Episode.mp3

 

skull

Interview With The Pacific Sentinel

20 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Alvarado in Magic, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

anthony alvarado, interview, Magic, Pacific Sentinel, writing

Check out this recent interview of me talking with the Pacific Sentinel!

Click on the link to read a quick chat about Magic, Art, Politics, and Leonard Cohen.

 

martial-arts

The Magic Hour Podcast

13 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Alvarado in Magic, meditation, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Erik Davis, Jason Traeger, podcast, The Magic Hour

magic-hour-logo

Here is the debut of my radio show The Magic Hour! With co-host Jason Traeger. We will be on XRAY FM Thursdays at 1:00 pm (every other week) here in Portland. But you can also listen to the show here as a podcast.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/themagichour/70s_episode.mp3

Check out our first episode where we talk to writer and thinker Erik Davis about the internet, subcultures, California, listening, and legal weed!

davis_erik_2008_rauner_michael

 

Interview with a Wizard

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by Alvarado in Magic, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Devin Person, Magic, Wizard

Brooklyn has a wizard for hire. His website offers occult consulting. His name is Devin Person and he has gone full wizard. I first became aware of this Person who one newspaper calls the “Weed-smoking Brooklyn wizard” after noticing his work featured over at Tarot Society. He seemed to be coming from a place that was paradoxically quite funny and yet serious about magic at the same time. That really piqued my curiosity. I reached out in this interview with Devin to find out—what does it mean to be a modern day wizard?

 wizard2

Did you gradually turn into a wizard or did it just happen one day — like you woke up and realized holy shit I AM a wizard!

 

There’s a concept in thermodynamics that Ilya Prigogine put forward that thinking of things in terms of “being” is really misleading, since everything is actually in a continuous process of “becoming” something else. Hot coffee is becoming cold coffee, a baby is becoming a toddler, and I am becoming a wizard. This is literally true since the archetypal wizard tends to be wizened, and I’m only 30. So while I most certainly AM a wizard, I’m also still in the process of becoming one. The span of time that process takes was also chosen intentionally since I’m a bit of a slacker and I like the idea of having until I’m 80 to “become what I want to be when I grow up.”

That being said, I was exposed to magic when Grant Morrison’s Arthur magazine interview blew off the back of my head at age 18. I started exploring esoteric eccentricity, reading half of Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick and trying to do daily lesser banishings of the pentagram in my garage, which amused my roommates to no end. Eventually my magic became more or less a private practice until I moved to New York and took a moment to marinate on the question, “What’s the most ME thing I can be?”

Well, I’ve got a tattoo of a wizard on my arm, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the paradoxical nature of magic in a modern context, and New York is a city where you can be whatever you badger people into accepting you as, so I decided, “Okay let’s do it. Hey everyone, I’m a wizard now.”

Of course, being a wizard, I used ritual magic to summon a more wizardly version of myself, and that transformation into an actual, semi-factual wizard took about a year. It’s all detailed in this Pecha Kucha presentation I gave a few months ago.

wizard3
 
Do others need to believe in magic in order to get benefits from what you do?

Nope! Wizard operate outside the normal perspective of the community they’re in, which worked in the past when boundaries and belief systems were more rigid and defined. These days, no one knows which way is up but I’m a wizard, not a guru or spiritual teacher, so no one needs to believe anything I say.

In fact, if I was going to give anyone advice about listening to what a wizard says, I’d say don’t take things too seriously and keep an open mind about what resonates with you. Art doesn’t have to be logical and narratively structured to convey meaning and emotion; wizardry works best when you keep things light and fun, avoiding the snares of dogma and self-seriousness.

What are some of your favorite resources for the budding? wizard (books, albums, movies, websites, strains of weed etc.)

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson was the first thing I read after I picked my brain off the floor from reading that Grant Morrison interview. Wilson is fantastic and that’s a great place to start for the newly curious. Early on, I read a lot of psychedelic comic books, so Morrison’s The Invisibles is a really fun way to explore magic principles in the context of a compelling narrative. Alan Moore was hugely influential, and he continues to be so to this day since I read his essay “Fossil Angels” two months ago and had my mind blown all over again.

In terms of movies, we live in a culture saturated with the influence of Joseph Campbell and generations of screenwriters striving to emulate the hero’s journey, so I suggest listening to Campbell’s incredible lectures (they’re on Spotify!) and then applying that lens to whatever media resonates for you personally in the larger cultural landscape.

Seriously, how seriously do you take yourself, seriously?

When I’m considering new projects, I strive to only do what makes me crack up. If I’m not laughing out loud, if I’m not giddy with anticipation for others to encounter my work, I take that as a sign I’m doing something wrong. Then I work to figure out why things stopped feeling fun and started feeling like work.

For example, I was getting stressed about my Kickstarter to publish my book until I had the idea to just do a campaign to raise $420. That idea was so stupid it kept me laughing through all the work required to actually do a Kickstarter, and in the end I raised four times as much and now my book is getting published.

There seems to be a renewed interested in magic and the occult. Why do you think that is?

 

I’ll quote Q-Tip of Tribe Called Quest here who said, “well daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles / Way that Bobby Brown is just amping like Michael.”

I think that’s true, this interest in the occult goes in cycles. Renewed interest from when? The 1960s and 1970s when Led Zeppelin was buying Crowley’s old possessions and single men were running the pickup line, “What’s your sign?” into the ground? Or renewed from the turn of the century when Theosophy, spiritualism, and seances were all the rage

We’ve always been fascinated by magic and the occult. Like religion, art, and science, magic is a way of looking at the world. I think magic is interesting because it embraces paradox, is comfortable with confusion, and tends to be holistic and subjective rather than empirical and objective. So, in a world where there is no “default perspective,” the idea of embracing that uncertainty has significant appeal.

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Do you think that the internet and technology are totally compatible with wizarding? Aren’t wizards supposed to be like, living off the grid, in a forest, in a straw thatched hut?

Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Lately, I’ve been thinking of magic as a mystery box of new technology that we don’t fully grasp yet, or is only understood by specialists. Back in the day, alchemy was a weird mix of arcane philosophy, proto-chemistry, and nonsense. We’ve pulled a lot of that proto-chemistry out of the mystery box and explained it with science, so if I throw flash powder on the ground, people will say, “Well that’s just how those chemicals react. That’s not magic.”

But if you didn’t know chemistry, my ability to produce smoke and light from a powder might astound you. That could be easily categorized as “magic.” So I think internet and technology are absolutely the best place a wizard can be. If we think of magic as crystals, candles, and old spells invented by Gerald Gardner and the Golden Dawn, what does that do for us? Does this affect reality in a way the ancients understood but modern science is blind to? Maybe, but that strikes me as a bizarre stance to take seriously. Magic does itself a disservice by trying to operate under the guise of science while failing to live up to its standards.

A marketer, on the other hand, is able to use images, words, and a Twitter account to get people excited about a new movie. How did they convince a large number of people to care about watching Seth Rogen get high with some new CGI creation? There’s the old marketing quote attributed to John Wanamaker, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

We don’t know why advertising works! It’s just that some of it does, and some of it doesn’t, which to me sounds like the state alchemy used to be in. So while I love the old-time aesthetics of magic, mysticism, and the occult, I care far more about the visions of the future I see in my computer screen than fighting to prove dowsing rods are a legitimate technology.

How important is the weed wizard connection? What about other psychedelics? Is it possible to be a stone-cold-sober wizard?

While I enjoy smoking pot, I think blunts make about as much sense as buttering bread with a broadsword. You want real insights, use weed like a scalpel. If you want to actually get something out of the marijuana experience, smoke a small amount, like one hit, then close your eyes and just chill. Let your mind wander. Listen to ambient music and zone out.

This provokes anxiety in a lot of people. Good. This meditative approach to marijuana is like going into the basement of your mind with a flashlight. If the light reveals there’s a bunch of old junk down there, you’d do well to clear it out! Shutting off the flashlight and ignoring the junk isn’t the solution.

So I say make repeated trips, get used to those anxieties, and slowly make some progress clearing things out until you can get a little bit high without that sense of unease. Marijuana isn’t making you anxious; it’s making you aware that you are already anxious.

Of course, pot is fun in other situations and psychedelics are useful too, but the important aspect I’ve found, which I think is often ignored, is acting on what you’ve learned. I equate psychedelic experiences to a tarot card reading. A good tarot card reading can produce some spookily accurate insights. But if instead of taking those hints and acting on them, you just shuffle the cards and go again, well now you’ve got mixed results. The first pull said this was a good time to be alone, and that felt true. The second pull says see your friends more, so now you’re not sure. Either way, sitting around doing tarot readings will never solve any of your problems.

This is all my personal opinion and should be regarded as the rantings of a known eccentric, but I say the same concept should be applied to the psychedelic experience. Do drugs sparingly, but hold their lessons for a long time. Take mushrooms with your friends on a camping trip, then return to civilization full of inspiration. Let the ideas you encountered in that psychedelic state take time to actually affect your life before you go for another round.

It’s appropriate that we call these experiences “trips,” because like a good vacation, they help you examine your life from a new place, a new perspective. But after a vacation, you have to come home and get your house back in order.

wizard1

 

What’s the connection between modern science, the paranormal & magic?

03 Tuesday Mar 2015

Posted by Alvarado in Magic

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Bigfoot, ghosts, Magic, paranormal, perception, UFOs

“Include the knower in the known.”

— a voice heard by Julian Jaynes

One of the things that got me kicked off writing about magic was a talk I gave several years ago entitled: Bigfoot, UFO’s and Ghosts. My theory in this lecture, in a nutshell was that most varieties of paranormal experience are probably manifestations of the same basic phenomenon. This phenomena seems to present differently based on the culture and beliefs of the perceiver.

That’s right. I am arguing that Bigfoot.

bigfoot-gta-6-will-we-see-bigfoot-in-rockstar-s-game

Little green men from mars.

images

And ghosts.

220px-Brown_lady

Are actually, basically the same thing. And always have been (not to mention stories from legends and fairy tales about goblins, genies, elves etc)  Which, yes, I know that sounds batshit crazy. It is saying “let’s take this weird stuff that most people already don’t believe in and make it even crazier!” Ha ha!

(This idea is easier to grasp if you let go of that idea of these phenomena being sentient—attributing sentience to something we don’t really understand confuses the matter, because then we try to understand motivation and then we are already barking up the wrong tree e.g. “well, why do the UFO’s want to mutilate cows in New Mexico?”. Instead it seems to mimic sentience (when interacting with us), and we should remember that at one point trees, wind, streams, etc. were all accorded sentience. The point is we humans tend to anthropomorphize dynamic forces beyond our comprehension. I’m not saying the phenomena isn’t sentient either, I’m saying that is currently beyond the scope of our knowledge. What is needed is a sort of metaphysical Turing test.)

However just because something is weird doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The fact is that all of the knowledge we have today, that we know got it’s start as a weird, laughable theory that only a few people believed. All science starts as fringe science.

For example if you tried to explain Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity to people in the Medieval ages you’d probably be burned at the stake. If you tried to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity to the same scientists who accepted Newton’s theory you would be a laughingstock. And yet now Einstein’s theories look tame when we are told of quarks, and super-string theory, and how physics seems to be pointing towards the existence of an infinite amount of real universes simultaneously existing within the multi-verse.

level-ii-multiverse-700x520

Wha!? The truth is cutting edge science is a lot weirder than anything believed by students of the paranormal.

One of the most fascinating developments in modern science is the idea that observing  something can affect the outcome of that phenomena. We see this demonstrated in the double-slit experiment. it is also expressed in Schrodinger’s’s famous thought experiment involving the dead/undead cat. Observing an elementary particles affects how it behaves. Let me repeat that: science has shown that observing a phenomenon can affect how it behaves. Nothing is being done to the phenomenon except observing it. According to everything rationality and science has been built upon this should not be!

And of course once the act of observing reality has been shown to affect reality, well, that raises some very serious questions about the possibility of being able to authentically observe the truth about reality in the first place! In our search for the truth we might be tampering with the evidence, influencing the witness, just by asking the question!

It reminds me of an essay I once read about how nobody really knows what panthers are really like in the wild. Because to observe the animal affects it. You simply can’t get that close to a panther in the wild. It will smell you from a mile off and go hide. Sure you might catch a glimpse of it here and there, slinking through the trees, eyes glowing in the bushes, and loping away into the night etc. But that is not really the same as observing it in nature, when it knows nobody is around. Of course you can observe a panther in a the zoo, but that is likely to change it’s behavior too. My guess is that most panthers in zoos are like most people in prison: depressed. In other words panthers are a bit like elementary particles they change their behavior when being watched by a human.

panther

What if the paranormal phenomena behaves in this same way—what if its behavior is affected by it being observed? Sure, this may raise as many questions as it answers. But thinking in these terms addresses many of the difficulties that have long plagued research into the paranormal. It greatly simplifies our model of the situation: which is what a good model should do. After all, it always seems that definite “proof” eludes researchers—the film of Bigfoot doesn’t develop properly, the ghost only visits when there are no witnesses, the UFO’s are always blurry in the video etc.

Smaerbuel

Science and skeptics scoff at that. And yet they tell us the exact same property is a tenet of modern physics (the backbone of all science). We can know the velocity of the particle or the direction but not both. This is a phenomena which limits what can be observed about itself. My point is that we seem to have the same property at play in observation of paranormal phenomena: it limits what can be observed about itself.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that it is sentient! Just as it would be a mistake to attribute sentience to the elementary particle. The limitation of what can be observed is a property not a desire of the phenomena in question (alternately it is perhaps a property of the nature of observation.) I’m afraid this theory does not provide us with any new answers. Instead it directs us towards new questions. What if the phenomena in question can, by definition, not be “scientifically” observed? What if that is the wrong modality through which to observe it?

What then is the right modality? I would say magic. If we are talking of something that is affected by perception then magic is the right tool for the job. As I discuss in DIY Magic: changing your perception changes your reality. Magic is the study of how to use this tenet.  It is the practice of tweaking, bending, changing, ones reality by tweaking, bending, changing ones perception. It is as simple as that. What I am suggesting in regards to the study of the paranormal is that, if this phenomena is affected by perception, it is not enough to study it naively at its face value. Oh, what is Bigfoot up to in the woods? What are those little green men up to now? Don’t be silly!

We must study how our perception interacts with this phenomena. In other words magically not scientifically. We must include the knower in the known.

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