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Has anyone else read Memetic Magic by R. Kirk Packwood? I borrowed it from the library in college and it changed my life forever. I only found out years later that physical copies are super scarce and worth like $4,000.
Okay, you can get a PDF of it for free here, if you want to read. I’ll try to explain why it is so weird first. https://x.com/DedHedRed/status/1363539631472603136?s=19
Back to this. I looked it up and there are like four used copies and one new one on the internet, for prices between $200 and $2,000. I don’t know what year it was when I looked up the $4K price — 2015? I read it originally when I lived in Portland in 2011.
Why did they have this book at the Portland Community College Library (Sylvania Campus)? Nobody there could tell me. Presumably someone needed it once and they ordered a copy? Or maybe R. Kirk Packwood went to PCC, lol.
Who is he? Nobody knows. Google thinks it’s this guy they scraped from a funeral website, but Goodreads has a book by Packwood about the summoning of Kek, so he had to be alive in 2016, right?
Okay, when I said this book changed my life, that has to be considered in context: I was, at the time, a practicing chaos magician involved with a weird cult of anarchists and Thelemites. I didn’t realize the danger I was in.
For example, one year someone at the community house decided to undergo the Abramelin working. This is an old and extremely powerful magical initiation that takes at least six months of intense prayer and ascetic living. Purpose: to contact your Holy Guardian Angel or HGA.
He prepared all the tools, built a “temple” out of white sheets in the dark basement. A couple days before he had planned to embark, he told us all that something had happened: his Holy Guardian Angel had contacted him and told him he could skip the whole process! 😈
Now, to be fair, this is what’s supposed to happen! The HGA is a voice in your mind that gives you perfect wise advice. Like the logoplasm that contacted PKD (or Jiminy Cricket for Pinocchio). IMO it’s your perfected future self contacting you mentally, but what do I know?
HOWEVER! The HGA is not the ONLY possible explanation for a voice in your head! This guy was young, ambitious, and weak. The perfect target.
I tried to explain this at the time. Even the power-tripping cult leader guy was sketched out by it (I think this was mostly like “hey, I choose which demons possess my minions” unfortunately). But the kid was pleased with himself and he scrapped the project.
Over the winter he fell into a deep depression. Just laying on the couch 24/7, curled up into a deep dark ball of bitterness and hatred. I literally stopped going over there because his bad energy was suffusing all three floors of the building. Then one day he snapped.
I wasn’t there but I had to come over and help clean up the mess afterward. It started with howling, in the middle of the night, just unending wails. They tried to shush him and he started running around grabbing up kitchen knives and things and trying to carve himself apart.
Finally they managed to subdue him and called the cops I guess. 51/50ed him. Committed involuntarily to a mental hospital. I never saw him again, though I heard he came out eventually and seemed to be okay.
So this was the type of magical hazard I was exposed to. I don’t know whether the Pied Piper cult guy had anything to do with that specific demon, but he definitely had a habit of keeping schizophrenics around as channels. I tried to rescue them but eventually I had to get out. 😰
That was the environment I was in when I read Memetic Magic. And around the same time I read a book called The War in Heaven, by Kyle Griffith. These two are inextricably linked in my mind as they both discuss the same topic: people, and beings, that subsist on psychic energy.
War in Heaven PDF here: https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/war-in-heaven.pdf
Obviously these books are wackadoo! They are the ravings of madmen, surely. Lots of pseudoscience on exhibit, not to mention space people and Illuminati and psychic vampires. But with my background in memetics and a chaote’s knack for arbitrary belief, I began to see in it Truth.
Man, I forgot how messed up this book is. Very Nietzschean worldview, Human Royalty above the lowly sheeple type beat. Gross. I don’t mean to say I agree with its values, I just saw people who did, and who used its techniques to prey on others. “Psychic vampires” in a sense.
In contrast, The War in Heaven battles against this type of individual. In Griffith’s ontology these are called Theocrats, and they attach themselves to other people’s psychic energy so that they will live on after death. Those who oppose them are the Invisible College.
Theocrats actually are spirits who refuse to reincarnate and instead prey on other spirits and living people. They try to trap you into their Fundamentalist groups to keep you around so they can absorb your soul into their fake Heaven when you die. 😬
Anyway, talking about all this is getting me paranoid. If any disembodied spirits are reading these tweets, here’s fingerball.
anyway, here’s fingerball pic.twitter.com/Sez5gWebgY
— Andrew “Y’all’ve Garden“ Mullen (@afmullen) November 21, 2020
Kyle Griffith has not been heard of for many years.
However, here’s another perspective on the whole thing: https://ron.ludism.org/wihih.html (though it doesn’t seem to reckon with the fact that it also uses a memetic framework).
On further reading it seems that Ron has disavowed the beliefs on that very old website. Hmm…
Apparently Kyle Griffith was closely involved with Ivan Stang of Subgenius… 🤔
