The
Modern Occultist
Interview #15
Gavin Fox
The Death Codex: The Accelerated Necromancer’s Special Edition
Erebus Society, 2024
MODERN OCCULTIST
The Trisphere
model—Synthetic, Systemic, and Kinetic—is one of the more genuinely original
frameworks to emerge from the Chaos Magick community in recent years, and what
immediately strikes the reader is the insistence that these three nodes
function as a continuous circuit rather than a linear progression. A desire
fired in the Kinetic can reinject itself into the Synthetic, fundamentally
changed by its cultural journey. You write that “many concepts, both magickal
and mundane, go around multiple times during their lives.” Can you give us a
concrete example from your own practice where you witnessed that circuit
complete an unexpected second or third rotation—and what it looked like when it
did?
GAVIN FOX
Well I am glad to hear that the Trisphere model resonated with you so deeply, and I hope it will be received with equal interest by your readers here too. Surprisingly enough it was my personal journey as an author that showed me the circuit was able to repeat in the first place, and that is by far the most interesting example that I can share.
One of the reasons I write under the name "Gavin Fox" is the latitude it allows me to insert myself into wider narratives. Through this I literally become a memetic device, infiltrating permaculture at the language level, something my actual physical body is obviously unsuitable for. Many years ago I now was just a young chaos magickian with both dyslexia and no formal training as a writer. I knew what I wanted to say, knew that I had to say it to remain sane, but lacked both the skill and the platform to actually do so effectively.
It was a last ditch effort to start moving forward as an author which made me begin looking seriously at Grant Morrison’s self insertion into The Invisibles. As a result the language based version of myself known as Gavin Fox was born. While this initial set of rituals occurred long before I had solidified the structure of Trisphere model, I can definitely look back now and see how they fell within that system. Through sigils, outreach and ritual under that hyperfictional pen name I initially harvested just enough attention at the synthetic level to generate the required interest by a handful of smaller publishers, who were willing to look beyond the rawness of my writing at the Systemic, narrative stage long enough to give me a platform. And once I was done the resulting magazines and anthologies entered the kinetic for the audience to enjoy.
Of course, as anyone
who has had a few things published over the years while handling their own
promotion will attest, if what you create has merit than it is eventually
reinserted through the universal mediums of advertising and word or mouth back
into the synthetic sphere to start all over again. I never planned for that of
course, though it came as a welcome surprise. My literary life has been
massively changed for the better by the repeated journey though the Trisphere
model’s ever turning nodes. The current rotation has me writing for Modern
Occultist, something that I would have lacked the confidence to even dream
of doing a decade ago. I do not know what lays ahead for me on the next go
around, but it will be fun finding out.
MO
You make a genuinely provocative claim at the heart of the article: that the audience is the real engine of memetic manifestation—that it’s the attention of others, invested, disinterested, oblivious, and dreaming alike, that feeds the meme until it’s ready to be fired. This puts the chaos magician in a fundamentally different relationship to their working than traditional solitary practice—you’re not the only power source in the room. How did you first arrive at that insight, and does it change the ethical calculus of the working?
GF
It was a happy accident actually. I used to share a few of my sigils online back in the early days of social media, mostly hidden in art pieces or short form fiction, and noticed a weird quirk whereby the results would seemingly manifest easier if others had engaged with them before I fired and forgot the glyph. Not every time of course. There are no silver bullets as far as magick goes. But when the desire did generate the road to manifestation was generally smoother, more directly tied to the original narrative in some way, and that got me thinking.
Around this time I was also engaging with the failed Technopagan current, mostly though old forum posts and surviving personal websites. While a lot of that discourse seems to have been rooted in cyber-utopianism, their less well discussed assertion that the online space could be manipulated like a second astral plane to generate magickal results intrigued me. After playing with the concept of harvesting attention for a while, both in the real world and online, I was shocked to find that there was suddenly a lot of talk out of nowhere about the role that the magickally charged memes of others may have played in certain highly contentious political events. The resulting backlash against chaos magick was visceral, and largely unfounded. But I dug around for answers, reverse engineered some of the techniques that were being vilified in the media, ignored the negativity and instead treated them like any other magickal system worthy of deconstruction. And from all these seemingly unrelated strands my Trisphere model finally emerged.
As far as ethical
considerations go, there is little danger in the act of siphoning off a bite of
attention here and there in the way I have formulated. This becomes doubly true
if those being shown it were going to engage with the memetic payload anyway,
even just in passing on their social media home feed. All I am doing is putting
that idle mind to use. This is a line that some will refuse to cross of course,
and I can respect that position on viewer sovereignty. But I see little
difference between my public payloads and what the average advertising agency
produces, except perhaps that I am more honest about what I want from the
equation than they are. Culture is a long con, nothing more, nothing less, and
it is better to be on the winning side of the table.
MO
The Grant Morrison and Alan Moore examples are the two most famous hypersigil cases in the tradition—Morrison writing himself into The Invisibles and living the consequences, Moore’s Constantine tipping him a smile on the street. You use both to illustrate Systemic Sphere operations, but then immediately note that the bar for entry at that level is one “few can scramble over.” The sigilbomb is your democratized alternative—Chaos Magic’s answer to the hypersigil for practitioners without a publishing deal or a global readership. How conscious was that parallel when you designed the sigilbomb format, and do you think it scales? Is there a version of this that works at Morrison-level reach?
GF
Well I would say that the parallel was not only a consideration when designing those events, but a driving force. I structured the format for the sigil bomb to democratize the strange as much as possible, stripping down the tools that brought others success and offering them to those who would never have a large enough platform of their own to make the system work.
I have a deep seated respect for Morison in particular. His DisinfoCon speech was one of my earliest magickal inspirations, while The Invisibles is groundbreaking even outside of the more mystical connotations it obviously holds. He worked and indeed bled for the audience which would later go on to empower such remarkable change within his hypersigilised mundane life. Such is the myth that surrounds his career, anyway.
The Projekt sigilbombs are a natural offshoot of the Trisphere model, group ritual done by individuals, each magickian freely using the attention of the other participants as a resource to solidify desire. The only real difference to a regular harvesting operation is that the majority of those there are not only aware of the attention being taken, but also working towards empowering goals of their own in return.
As for scaling, it is a double edged sword. Things can always be done to push the envelope as far as numbers go, though the more people take part in an event the harder it is to keep everyone engaged. Over saturation is a heat-sink of sorts for operations such as these.
That said, I think the answer lies in openly releasing this technology into occulture and watching many smaller sigilbombs grow up through interested groups as opposed to a big, single mass firing undertaken by every chaote on the ‘net. So that is what I have always aimed for, and having the Trisphere model laid out in the pages of Modern Occultist will definitely help.
MO
You describe >_”Projekt”.. —the egregore that emerged from your sigilbombs—with a kind of fond, slightly awed detachment: “my distillation of that decentralized and indeed cyber-utopian memetic essence,” still out there in the online stacks, quietly humming. That’s a significant thing to have created: an autonomous entity born from collective magical attention, now running independently of its originator. What is your actual relationship with >_”Projekt”.. at this point? Do you work with it actively, or has it genuinely become something that operates beyond your direction?
GF
>_”Projekt”.. is an anomaly for sure. I never set out to create an egregore in the first place, and really just had to find somewhere to put all the residual energy from the sigilbomb that has just finished a few hours before. That year I was working on barcode based glyphs, and when the seven I had generated were laid out side by side at the end of the event they seemed to contain a definite grinning skull motif. The rest, as they say, is history.
Of course I could have
twisted it into something self serving. Perhaps others would have in my place,
arguing that the left over hum in the air was payment for keeping the ship on
course over the week and to be used as they saw fit. But the energy that had
been raised leading up to its creation was not mine to keep. So I birthed
something in the spirit of early freeware, and released it into the stacks. I
still call upon >_”Projekt”.. by name before starting the sigilbombs I run
even now, though it is far from a personal relationship. My creation is away on
a diplomatic mission of sorts, smoothing the path for open access digital
occult rituals, and rarely comes back to share a cup of coffee with its
creator. But I can feel it doing what it does, and encourage anyone else who
has similar events at the planning stage to call upon its aid too.
MO
Your closing paragraph is one of the most self-aware things written about Chaos Magic I’ve read in years: you describe passing these memes to others so that you may be remembered through them, and then immediately invite those greater minds to eventually turn your pet paradigm to charcoal on the permacultural bonfire. That’s a writer who understands, at bone level, what memetics actually means—that the idea survives the thinker by being transformed beyond recognition. You’ve described yourself as the originator of “esoteric accelerationism,” a movement explicitly designed to disrupt and evolve occulture from within. If the Trisphere model is itself a meme—and by your own logic it must be—what would it look like for it to complete its circuit successfully? What does “turned to charcoal by greater minds” actually mean to you as an outcome?
GF
It would be disingenuous of me to try and guess what shapes others will draw with the charcoal that my Trisphere model eventually becomes. Both my peers and subsequent generations are going to take what resonates and discard the rest. Dance to their own tunes in the firelight, as I shall continue to do until rendered to ash myself.
I will say this though. As with any system, the three node framework I have settled upon is just a series of cogs and belts which can be rearranged to suit the needs of the next person to hold the winding key after I am done with it. Innovation has always been a driving force in chaos magick, and that sets it apart from more traditional paths who prefer a backward glance instead.
But the important thing for the memetic engineer to remember is that such mechanisms, while perhaps pretty, are just ornamentation unless they actually perform the task that they were created for. Functionality over form, always and in all things. Anything else is fandom masquerading as enlightenment, and a waste of time.
The world of the weird is already steeped in far too much mythology, each story a pretty trick of words that hides more than it teaches. Indeed that is something that my esoteric accelerationism movement is actively trying to burn away. Through it I hope to return the idea of magick as a birthright for everyone, the uninitiated masses included, to the forefront of the magickal discourse. Make them us, as Grant Morrison once famously said.
MO
In your personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students and initiates—how would you describe “Occult Philosophy”?
GF
I think I may have a slightly controversial take on that to be honest. Magick for me is cut and paste. Collage. Bricolage. Patchwork synthesis. Stripping the core correlations out of a hundred different spell books and stapling them back together as a battering ram to bust open the doors to the treasure vault of abundance so I can grab something shiny. I find the hidden philosophical aspects are the least interesting, outside of my enduring love of folklore of course. Considering that one of my favorite riffs on the Lesser Banishing Ritual replaces all of the named angels with 1980’s Decepticons, and still works to align consciousness while calming the energy in the room, my pop culture mysticism has pedigree. Each to their own though. Last thing I would want to do is disrespect the choices of others, or make myself out to have the only true path to enlightenment or some such nonsense. Many find happiness in the myths and poetry of a bygone age. Comfort in hierarchical grades and robed fraternal orders. I do not, but that is no reason to exclude others from enjoying being a part of something bigger than themselves. It was just never for me is all.
As
for the new initiates, I would advise only that they take the taller tales that
seem to infest the magickal space with a whole circle of salt. The stories have
allegorical power. They are morality plays, ways of sharing hidden insights,
perhaps even rituals in their own right. But the magick itself is rarely that
complicated once you get a feel for the strings that need to be pulled to make
the puppets dance.
MO
What was your personal start on your own journey on this path?
GF
That is a tough one to be honest. I think I was always going to become an occultist of some kind, the only question was what port in the storm I would sail to when the spooky hit the fan, which it seemed to have a habit of doing alarmingly regularly while I was growing up. I had this knack for getting into strange situations, poking around in places I was not supposed to be. Pushing for the truth while having no life experience to help me see what that even was. Making an immature mess. I guess I first brushed up against magick the way many people do, in comic books and cartoons. I was always the weird, grungy kid who looked for secret tunnels under the school, swapped tales of haunted houses with classmates, climbed through the windows of derelict churches to see what hid between the rotting pews. Bodies sometimes, though that is another story entirely.
My upbringing was a strange mix of bland Cockney doomerism coupled with a familial mistrust of witchcraft and sorcery that I could never quite understand. Nuts and bolts 1980’s working class in one of the poorest areas of East London. Everything sucks, the money and power of others as a boot on your neck that will choke you to death unless you learn to fight back and take what you need, you get the idea. So perhaps it was rebellion that fueled my descent into the void, and all those years of critically reading and deconstructing the mythologies of others as little more than an exercise in escapism helped shore up my first spells when I was backed into a particularly sensitive corner during my early twenties. It was then I secretly declared myself a chaote in the hopes that the title would allow me to regain control of my life through sheer iconoclasm alone. It worked, though such words have power, and carry a weight that must be shouldered on a cultural level, especially if you then let everyone else know what you are like I did in my thirties. Publish and be damned indeed.
Magick
was my way of fighting back. Against my social class, my upbringing, even my
own neurodivergence and the toll that took upon my schooling. But then again if
a dyslexic occultist with short term memory issues and a desire to burn the
world to ash in the flames of change is not the single most perfect poster
child for the wider discipline of chaos magick then I really have no idea what
else would be.
MO
To this magazine, the concept of “modern occultism” can (and should) be equally viewed from both the academic and practical sides. What would you recommend to a person only now coming along to these subjects, and is uncertain if an objective academic career, or a true “practical path” may be right for them?
GF
Well I would remind them that there is no shame in shopping around and finding your own balance of the two. I have very little formal education beyond a somewhat botched university undergrad in psychology, and a couple of years graphic design before that, though I suppose these aforementioned decades of reading into the stranger side of human experience set me up well for my eventual leap into practical ritual. Writers by their vary nature are participant observers, changed by the research that they do, academic or not, though anyone exploring occulture tends to be warped by the experience. Chaos magick especially rewards a hunger for self study, with the only downside being a lack of formal grades in the specific aspects of the Art that are the most important to learn.
Allied
trades such as history, sociology and for the memetically minded mage,
advertising and media studies are viable subjects though. And surprisingly, the
sciences too. Education of any kind is empowering, and the thirst for knowledge
should be encouraged. Apprenticeships are also viable, and help you get a
foothold in the ever shifting job market ahead of time while learning. All
those grimoires and candles are not exactly cheap, after all.
MO
What is one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped shape your journey and personal philosophies that you would recommend to a new student or occult practitioner (or historian / academic)?
Putting Grant Morrison’s DisinfoCon speech aside for now, seeing as it already got a mention earlier, I would have to say The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey. Now I know it is a divisive one, and that there are some troubling aspects to the underlying philosophy of the Church of Satan as well. Problems that seem to have only gotten worse over the years as the group replaced relevance with orchestrated notoriety. But as a standalone document it really does work as an effective tool of cultural deprogramming, if you can sit through the bombastically sour prose. More a psychological manifesto than religious or mystical tract, the subsequent books published by that group never seemed to hit the spot the same way as it did for me. Nihilistic, elitist and a definite product of the time it was conceived, true. Confused and contradictory with regards to just how invested in actual occultism the author really was back at the start of that journey as well. But the text itself has a strange, perhaps wholly accidental ability to scour the psyche clean of competing memes, and I find myself returning to it every so often to do just that.
And
finally, what is one daily activity that you believe is a MUST for all seekers
of the occult philosophies and/or arts?
GF
One word. Journalling. Self awareness is essential to both survive and thrive during any type of magickal journey. This is increasingly an age of the eclectic self-initiating initiate, and as a result we rarely work together with others. Not a bad thing, of course, but it is very different to how things used to be back when the occult was literally the domain of groups that were as hidden as the word actually hints. While I am no fan of sorts of hierarchical structures that many would consider to be a staple of that past, they can prove a useful way to stop inexperienced practitioners from losing touch with reality entirely. The solo explorer should engage in a similar dialogue whenever possible, albeit with the words on the page as opposed to real world brothers or sisters of the craft. It really does help.
There is a reason why
so many of the literary magickians end up becoming the villain by the end of
the tale. Great power can be found in believing you are right. That the
universe will bend to your will and give you what is owed for all your hard
work and toil. Ego and determination make for fantastic driving forces, though
just as easily destroy what has already been built when handled poorly. Yes,
this is the bleeding edge that needs to be danced upon to get the best results.
But nothing can be gained from either ending up in a padded cell or early grave
because you thought of yourself as too powerful to fail. All the coolest angels
fall, true, but only the most mentally resilient get the chance to rise again,
and wiser for hitting the ground with such a hard crunch.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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