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Cortesía de Sére Skuld, Ivana Ray Singh, Margit Glassel, Sabrina Rodríguez, Bruja de Ciudad, Tayri Caos y Diana Calabaza Cósmica. 
Photo courtesy of Sére Skuld, Ivana Ray Singh, Margit Glassel, Sabrina Rodríguez, Bruja de Ciudad, Tayri Caos and Diana Calabaza Cósmica. 

Witches and Magicians cast a spell against the coronavirus

In an age when panic is as dangerous as the virus itself, an ancient art has been put to the service of the confined.

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Two days before the state of emergency was declared in Spain because of the advance of COVID-19, the Spanish witch Sére Skuld began to feel sick. "A doctor friend of mine answered the phone and when I told him about the symptoms he said I was infected. It was a brutal shock. I had a terrible night, I woke up exhausted, looked at the sky and thought I should do something," she said.

Sére Skuld is one of the two founders of this small virtual coven formed by seven witches that emerged to face the pandemic - or rather, the panic that dominates us in such hard and strange times - and has become a space for magical collaboration. 

It started when she talked to Tayri and, between the two of them, they proposed to make a hyper-sigil - the union of several magic symbols - that would be very powerful. They would create it, activate it and launch it into cyberspace in just a few days. That was the plan.

However, as they shaped it, they invited other fellow witches and sorcerers to join the challenge.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pero Sére, ¿las brujas no podéis hacer nada? Esa pregunta, formulada a través de instagram por una persona aterrorizada y aislada en su casa sin compañía, se me clavó muy dentro. Soy una bruja realista. Lavarse las manos, respetar la cuarentena y las normas de prevención son nuestras herramientas en este plano. Pero también podemos trabajar más planos y seguir siendo una comunidad, a pesar de estar en aislamiento. Supe que tenía que contactar con Tayri Caos para crear un Hipersigilo y no tardaron en unirse a nosotras otras cinco brujas maravillosas, cada una de ellas aportando su maestría. Para quienes no tengáis familiaridad con este término, en palabras de mi querida Tayri: "Un sigilo es un ritual abreviado, una frase de una voluntad abstraida que cargamos para luego soltar\eliminar y, de esta manera, introducirlo en el subconsciente esquivando la razón. Un hipersigilo tiene intención, simbolismo, estado alterado de conciencia. Representa un manojo entero de voluntades relacionadas, es decir, sobre un mismo proceso de transformación con mayor complejidad, dividimos las posibles partes y creamos un sigilo con cada una de ellas, potenciando el desarrollo de manera holística. Creando cada una una obra de manera individual sobre el mismo proceso de transformación y uniéndolo en este Hipersigilo aquí expuesto, hemos potenciado holísticamente el poder del Covid19 o Coronavirus para usar toda su fuerza a nuestro favor, convirtiéndolo así pues en nuestro mayor y fiel aliado". . Espero que estas piezas os resuenen y os ayuden. Si tenéis cualquier pregunta, no dudéis en contactar. El futuro será comunitario, o no será. Un abrazo muy fuerte. . ******************************************* Aquí os dejo los detalles de quienes hemos participado en esta iniciativa: @tayricaos y @sere.skuld --> Hipersigilo CovidXIX @glasselmargit --> Carta Astral @sabrinarguez --> Pieza de sonido </covid_19> @dianacalabazacosmica --> Hechizo e invocación @brujxdeciudad --> Salmodia @ivana_ray_singh --> Conjuro Abracadabra-Coronavirus . . #brujasycovid19 #Chaosmagick #chaos #brujeria #magiadelcaos #sig #sigilmagick #sigil #witchcraft #hypersigilo #coronavirus #sigilo #bruja

A post shared by Sére Skuld (@sere.skuld) on

A spell of spells

Tayri, who realizes these symbols of the Chaos Magic - the left hand path, the DIY side of magic - and shares them in her Instagram account, always wanted to create a hyper-sigil together, and she was thinking about it when the stars aligned and the project took shape. 

"A sigil is an idea or concrete will that you want to abstract in order to pass it through the back door of the rational part of the brain and a hyper-sigil is a much more complicated idea," said Tayri, "A hyper-sigil represents a whole bunch of related wills on the same transformation process where we divide the possible parts and create a sigil with each of them, enhancing the development in a global way. What we did was to unite these parts to enhance the power of COVID-19 and use it to our advantage."

A song, a performance, a painting, and even a comic book can be a sigil or hyper-sigil, depending on the number of symbols that are intertwined. Then, the creator can reserve it or activate it in multiple ways, such as meditation, and then launch it and forget it so that it works.

"With the Chaos Magic you can create your own psychic triggers with what you have at hand, whether it's in your kitchen or even office supplies.", Sabrina Rodríguez.

This seemingly simple idea can be twisted and developed using art. To paraphrase the writer and scriptwriter Alan Moore in Fossil Angels - "What has sorcery ever claimed that art has not already undeniably achieved?" - art, Sére thinks, is "the origin, the beginning and the end of magic."

"The engine of our sigil must be acceptance in order to use the strength of our supposed opponent and make it our ally. We made a series of statements that we had to carefully refine in order to mobilize what we wanted, and nothing more than that. The rest was quite organic," she admitted.

It wasn't about saving the world from COVID-19, but about changing the way society is dealing with the pandemic. But how?

The Power of Sound

For the Galician witch, Sabrina Rodríguez, the Chaos Magic is to traditional magic what punk was to rock. "Many people think that to be a magician you have to live in the forest or spend a fortune on magic tools... For them, either it's a natural life that - in my opinion, doesn't exist because nature is beautiful but brutal-, or it seems that magic is super capitalist. Instead, with the Chaos Magic, you can create your own psychic triggers with what you have at hand, whether it's in your kitchen or even office supplies," she said. And even more so when you're confined.

Sabrina was one of the first witches to join the project with a very particular sigil: a "piece of sound" that she made through Technomancy (the union of technology and magic). In a post accompanying the piece she explained it as follows:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

</covid_19> es una pieza de sonido realizada para la iniciativa caota #brujasycovid19 para poner fin a la #pandemia. Una acción poética, un acto de #magia en #comunidad. El uso de los símbolos </> para contener el nombre del virus se deben a que </> es una etiqueta de cierre en código HTML, lenguaje de marcas de hipertexto, que es el que se utiliza para hacer páginas web y que me pareció el apropiado ya que el proyecto se lanza online. Al ser una etiqueta de cierre y contener el nombre del virus, el significado del título sería algo como "cerrar o terminar el COVID-19". Sobre la pieza sonora, fue realizada a través de la conversión de datos a #sonido usando un proceso de #databending y edición experimental a partir de PDFs de la Organización Mundial de la Salud con información sobre el #coronavirus, mezclado con samples de una discusión en mandarín de la editora Helena Hui Wang y el profesor Cao Bin sobre la morbilidad clínica y los factores de riesgo de muerte para pacientes hospitalizados con infección por COVID-19. Una curiosidad; el proceso de databending utilizado consiste en abrir los datos brutos de los archivos con un programa de edición de audio provocando un #glitch (un error) ya que estamos abriendo un archivo con una herramienta que no está diseñada para trabajar ese tipo de archivos (un PDF es un archivo de texto, no de audio). Al abrir el PDF sobre los peligros de la pandemia, sonaba como una alarma o una sirena de emergencia, lo cual es muy curioso porque lo que el programa interpreta como sonido son los datos brutos, no el contenido del texto. Fue una casualidad que esos datos concretos sobre ese tema en particular sonasen así; un "happy accident", una sincronía extraña, el fantasma en la máquina, pura magia del caos, tecnomancia, algo sobre lo que seguro que William S. Burroughs tendría mucho que decir y que me dio escalofríos cuando lo escuché. Por supuesto, así tenía que empezar la pieza y ese es el sonido que se oye al principio. Podéis escuchar la pieza sonora entera en: https://soundcloud.com/sabrinarguez/covid_19 (link en bio) El vídeo que veis, está realizado a través de un proceso de #datamosh, #glitchart decodificando archivos de vídeo.

A post shared by Sabrina Rodríguez (@sabrinarguez) on

Sabrina also says that listening to the composition with headphones for a long time can lead to altered states of consciousness. 

The Power of Words

Ivana Ray Singh, an artist and chaos magician, joined the project because she was fed up with the way the pandemic was reported through the media and wanted at least the fear to disappear with an "abracadabra". 

"Abracadabra" is one of the oldest healing spells in existence and has been used since the Roman Empire. It is said to be the word for double power, capable of uniting the sphere of the microcosm with the macrocosm. "I visualized it by imagining each letter of the abracadabra disintegrating and realized that it has 11 letters, like coronavirus," said Ivana. For the magician and musician, the most important thing is the self-governing of each one of us, the learning we get from the decisions made and the understanding that any action taken affects others. So, she created her sigil, activated it, burned it and joined it to the others. 

"This virus is being an agent of chaos, but from destruction, a new order is born," Bruja de Ciudad.

It's in the line with what Beatriz did, aka Bruja de Ciudad, who created a powerful spell, a chant that has to be recited aloud, as Tayri did in a video explaining the process step by step. "Its function is to involve interested people in the process, not just seeing it, but experiencing it, using the power of each person's word to continue expanding the hyper-sigil," said Beatriz.

"I understood that we had to flow with that, to accept the situation. This virus is being an agent of total chaos, but from the destruction, a new order is being born," said the Spanish witch, who claims that the hyper-sigil launched was already powerful, but the effect expands when it is carried out in different locations, "like the waves in the water of a huge ocean, the water moves faster and faster."

A path of transformation

Margit Glassel, a German magician whose magic also works on the net, agrees with the witch, but warns that "we have to be aware that anything we publish is a bit of a sigil because people read it, charge it (with energy) and put it in their minds".  

Margit, who is also an astrologer, drew up the birth chart for the day when the state of emergency over the pandemic was declared, to include it in the hyper-sigil: "The first thing I saw was that, on an energy level, countries are projecting the virus as an enemy. I visualized it with a crown, like a prince of hell, with the Sun, the 19th arcane of Tarot, and I made an invocation so that this transmuted energy would bring about a positive change, the resurgence of a new social structure".

Cartas astral realizada por Margit Glassel.

Her proposal is evolutionary. Instead of "continuing to unleash chaos with her legions of demons", Margit seeks the opposite. And that's because the magician, besides working with chaos, also works with the sinister path. That is, the ancient energies that Christianity demonized. 

"You have to keep a curious mind in front of everything that happens, the beautiful and the horrible", Margit Glassel.

Six powerful spells, six hyper-sigils threaded together, which were later joined by some Tarot cards created by the artist and magician Diana Calabaza Cosmica, and which were activated in their entirety by Tayri and launched on Instagram in the form of stories for the common good. And, above all, as a teaching that is revealed to us...

"In times when we seem to have no control over anything and are only victims of what is happening, the Chaos Magic serves to influence how we live a situation and what we do with it," said Sére. And Margit nods: "You have to keep a curious mind in front of everything that happens, the beautiful and the horrible. No truth is absolute and everything is possible, and when you come to that understanding you are not only more creative but more compassionate to others." 

Today, the effects of the hyper-sigil of these magicians and witches of chaos continues its course. Their creation process is no secret, they have shared it in their networks so that anyone who wants to can emulate it. Share it. Integrate it. And surely, in the future we will hear more about them.

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