Tuesday, May 10, 2005
CHAOS MAGICK AT MEDJUGORJE
It’s common knowledge that the nation of Yugoslavia disintegrated into ethnic war in the midst of the Medjugorje apparitions, and following the fall of communism. E. Michael Jones demonstrates in The Medjugorje Deception how the cultural factors associated with the apparitions were instrumental in the development of ethnic cleansing shown to the world for the first time in the upheaval there. "Chaos" is a word that aptly fits what happened in former Yugoslavia.
According to the Metareligion website, Magick is about manifesting the magician’s will in the universe. It is about change for the benefit of the magician. This “can range from a simple acquisition, such as creating circumstances favorable to getting a job, to the highly metaphysical, such as conversing with the angelic entities of the Elizabethan magus John Dee” as the Metareligion website explains it.
Chaos Magick is a relatively new discipline of the proverbial magus, one with ever more sinister connotations. It “is an innovative, modern, and disturbing approach to the realization” of the intentions of those who invoke it. It is "Magickal Terrorism," according to Metareligion.
The discipline “uses the deconstructionist theories of Jacques Derrida, the interest in random phenomena of John Cage and Minimalism, and the humor of Dada to create ritual spaces for magickal acts.” It is not a reformulation of old techniques. It attempts to “deconstruct consensual belief structures, free the energy trapped by these beliefs, and radically alter the movement of the quantum flux.” It assaults accepted patterns of belief and attacks the status quo, targets the mechanism of belief, and suggests that what is important is the mechanism of belief rather than the object of belief. Thus no belief is sacred, and disrupting belief is a tool of the process. Change is the state of choice.
As such it lies in direct opposition to any religious system, which can become the target of it. Disruption can include deception and lies. Although the technique itself rejects dualism, from the Christian perspective is relies on fallen spirits to work its system. What better hope has the fallen angel than to convince practitioners of his art that nothing else exists outside of him, and hence the system he proposes is not dualistic, leaving no ground for the possibility of goodness?
Chaos magick uses and borrows from religion, particularly Buddhism. It borrows from psychological techniques of brainwashing, and the works of Jung and Freud on the unconscious. It even borrows from method acting the technique of forgetting your identity. The practice of chaos magick can recreate the personality of an individual.
In his essay "Liber KKK," Peter J. Carroll, one of the developers of the chaos discipline in magick, breaks the techniques down into "five classical magical acts" including evocation, divination, enchantment, invocation, and illumination. He describes evocation as "work with entities which may be naturally occurring or manufactured. They may be regarded as independent spirits…"
Co-founder, along with Carroll, of the chaos discipline in magick, Austin Osman Spare, according to Jaq D. Hawkins, indicates that "the key element is to achieve a state of 'vacuity' which can be done through exhaustion, sexual release or several other methods." It’s an apt description of the state of a channeler.
Drugs are used in magick, as chaos magician Princess Jess relates in this description of the enhancement marijuana provides:
I did magick for about a year and a half before I ever used drugs with magick. During that time I smoked marijuana (dragonswort) from time to time with my friends. The thought to use dragonswort for magick didn’t even occur to me until I met someone who did. Maybe it was like a shortcut, but when I tried doing magick with dragonswort, my magick became more intense and somewhat easier. Easier in that smoking dragonswort + some other simple form of gnosis, like breathing or dancing, would get me into really extreme states of consciousness where magick seemed to flow all around me.
With this explanation of chaos magick in mind, let’s move on to some passages from The Medjugorje Deception.
The "children" who had the first vision claimed to have been attending sheep until they were warned not to lie, at which point they changed the story to that of going up the mountain for a smoke. What were they smoking? (The Medjugorje Deception p. 84-85)
Seer Mirjana was known in the village as a "Pankerica," someone on the trendy side of city culture who was rumored to have used drugs. Did an entity take advantage of her while she was "high"? Is it possible that she was in contact with one of the numerous OTO groups in the area where she learned a method of evocation? The possibility cannont be entirely ruled out, especially in light of her reputation and the fact that black metal musicians gravitate to OTO activities, as Gavin Baddeley makes clear in his book Lucifer Rising: sin, devil worship & rock 'n' roll.
But Mirjana is not the only seer who may have been or still is in contact with disembodied spirits. Among the seers spun off from Medjugorje is one named Vassula Ryden who claimed to get messages directly from Jesus in the form of handwriting. In occult literature this would be called "automatic writing." According to Jones:
In April 1991 [Fr.] Pavich met a young Australian by the name of Kim Davison, who handed him another book, or at least the manuscript copy of what was to become a significant book on the Medjugorje circuit. Kim was an exotic figure from the homosexual demimonde of Athens. A seller of trinkets by day, a homosexual prostitute by night, and some-time drug dealer… (p. 195)
Davison’s manuscript was the automatic writing of Vassula Ryden after it had been edited by "an itinerant Austrian souvenir peddler named Erwin Schlacher." (p. 195) The manuscript was left with Fr. Pavich. It contained theological errors as demonstrated by the following:
At one point Jesus tells Vassula that the souls in Purgatory could "escape from my foe’s claws" with the help of her prayers, evidently not understanding that they had already done so by the very fact that they were in Purgatory. (p. 196)
Yet despite the dubiousness of this method and the material it produced,
all of the theological luminaries of the Medjugorje movement, including Father Rene Laurentin and Father Edward O’Connor of the University of Notre Dame, fell over themselves in their haste to endorse Vassula. "What the Serbs did not get done with guns and cannons," Pavich wrote to Father Mitchell Pacwa, S. J. in September 1993, "the Orthodox Vassula has achieved through the very mouths of the ‘pillars’ of Medjugorje…. Pavich feared the "wreckage and fall-out this is bringing or will bring." (p. 196)
Vassula claimed that the urge to write was uncontrollable and that the handwriting was not her own, but rather that of Christ. She indicated that she felt "a kind of supernatural vibration that was flowing through my hands. I had been writing a shopping list, but my hand began to shake, and the pencil was too strong for me to control." (p. 197)
If Christ were doing the writing and there was no control on the part of Vassula, there should be no errors, yet her manuscripts needed serious editing. "Page after page of text is littered with the most arrant nonsense and theological error." (p. 198)
Vassula’s arrival on the scene seemed to be confirmation of the fact that the apparition movement was in the grip of a spirit which excluded reason from its deliberations. It was also an indication that one of the primary fruits of the apparition mania was a spirit of division. The psychological dynamics of the movement’s followers seemed to guarantee this. The spiritual restlessness…among the apparition followers demanded novelty as the effects of a particular apparition wore thin with familiarity. This set up a craving for something new, something a little more shocking than the previous apparition. Once a new seer arrived on the scene, however, there were always those who were reluctant to go along and the result was division. (p. 198)
Vassula’s appearance was more divisive than most.
What began as an attempt to maintain order in the chaos following the Council, started, after a while, to sound suspiciously like a power struggle in the movement. Either way, the charges and countercharges must have seemed bewildering to the same people, who, not too long ago, saw the alleged messages of Our Lady of Medjugorje as a way out of the confusion plaguing the Church…. By the fall of 1991, Medjugorje was full of the same cacophony of competing and contradictory claims that had made the movement an appealing alternative in the first place. (p. 199)
That is a description of chaos. Coming as it does as a result of what certainly suggests occultism, the label of "chaos magick" is easily applied. Certainly even a brief study of the Ordo Templi Orientis phenomenon will give the reader a clear picture of formation, division, reformation of the various occult groups. Schism is the modus operandi of occultism.
The ultimate division finally came over Vassula’s promotion of The Poem of the Man-God, a book written by Maria Valltorta, and a book which had been on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books in 1959. Now this book turned up on the booklists of Medjugorje centers worldwide.
Fr. Pavich disapproved of the book. Jones writes, "Pavich, however, never came to the conclusion that fraud was involved. His involvement in Vassula confirmed him in thinking that the seers were "in touch with an entity." "That’s the scary part," he said. "That’s the worst scenario you can imagine." (p. 200)
Seer Marija Pavlovic claimed that "the Blessed Mother told her that Valtorta’s book was good reading." Caritas of Birmingham announced that seer "Vicka asked Our Lady about the book…and Our Lady is reported to have said, ‘It makes for good reading.’" (p. 201)
Yet in spite of the book’s condemnation in 1959, those who refused to endorse it were "excommunicated" from the Medjugorje movement. The book is still being promoted today at Vassula Ryden’s website. It is being promoted by Wayne Weible (click the "Other Materials" link on the left), a familiar name in the charismatic movement. It is being promoted by Medjugorje centers. Promotion of such a book makes the Medjugorje movement with its internal divisions look like the work of an entity intent upon the destruction of the Catholic faith, such destruction being the result of internal divisions that undermine the credibility of the Church and set one group of believers against another group.
Those who accept this book as authentic Catholicism have set themselves in direct opposition to the hierarchy of the Church. That is the typical antinomianism that follows in the wake of signs and wonders.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
