Ritual- Paolo Scarpelli

Ritual- Paolo Scarpelli
1/15/24

 

Last friday I was invited to a festival in Bologna, in northern Italy, to celebrate a magickal ritual. The ritual was dedicated to the memory of Mark Fisher, who died that day 7 years ago.

Fisher was a british philosopher, an accelerationist thinker. He was involved with the CCRU in the 90s, mixing chaos magick with academical theory.

His last book is called "The weird and the eerie" and it was the theme of the ritual. For Fisher the weird and the eerie are forces haunting reality, opening cracks in what he calls "capitalist realism", that is practically the same concept of DKMU's consensual reality. The idea that the world is as it is and "there's no alternative". By forming alliances with these otherworldy forces we can transform reality.

Around 30 people joined the ritual, no one was a magick practicioner, just people with utopian ideas and the urgency to find new ways to reimagine the existent. I introduced them to urban magick. We had a magickal drift in a suburban district, searching for weird and eerie things. Some formed small groups, some went alone, the only rule was to move through the streets by following your own feelings. The task was to find the places of interest where the weird and the eerie were flowing and then leave a sigil we previously created with the intent to open portals.

After an hour we met again and we closed the ritual by charging the sigil, meditating all together in a circle.

The ritual was clearly very similar to the hexorian practices, but I preferred to use a new sigil and not introduce Hexorian concepts, since most people had heard about chaos magick for the first time that night, and it was already confusing enough. Anyway, I invoked Hexorius during my drift, as a saint protector of the whole operation, as i surely think that the forces that Fisher called Weird and Eerie are manifestations of what we call 888 Current, flowing from the City Below right into our cities.

The ritual was succesful. A lot of people had meaningful experiences and some cool synchronicities happened. We certainly made the city stranger, at least for that night.

I had a lonely drift and it was pretty interesting. At one point i've been attracted by a covered walkway that was clearly emanating eerie energy. On a column i found a Sator Square, the famous templar symbol, that someone had scribbled on the stone with a black marker. I left the sigil attached on a spider web that was right above the square. One moment later two people passed by under the passageway and one of them said to the other: "tonight this street is so weird!". I almost burst out laughing like a mad supervillain.

Hexorius remembered me i had to pay my tribute by feeding the city , when a homeless girl asked me for a cigarette and then followed me in the last part of my drift. She left stealing my tobacco and 20 euros i gave her, saying she was coming back with beers. It's totally fair, the ritual was big and a little money and a handful of tobacco are the least i could offer to the city.

I think this whole thing could be my contribute to the #LetThereBeLight initiative, as i really feel that the community that participated in the ritual is a living seed of Arcadia, a manifestation of a world yet to come forcing itself into our present and becoming real.

In the picture: the sigil of the operation. Feel free to experiment with it as you wish.