kaos

After corresponding for a while Amodali flew to London and we performed the kaosbabalon
working—an intense magical experience that still does not yield to my powers
of description—and initiated the 156 current, which I wrote about in somewhat frenzied
detail in KAOS 13 and here join with others to write about further in this current issue.
So why the gap of over a decade?
I was at the pinnacle of my occult explorations, yet something within me drew me
away from the occult scene completely. What had seemed like total success, the
alchemist’s dream realised, turned sharply into what appeared to be complete failure
and illusion, and the glory, all too brief glory of Babalon, dissolved like a lingering
mirage. I experienced it as the elixir of fulfilment and magical reality turning to ashes in
my mouth. I was, quite literally, on the edge of magical lunacy and I recognised the
signs in others who had gone before me—Jack Parsons declaring himself the Antichrist
after his Babalon Working with Marjorie Cameron, for instance.
Amodali went her way and I went mine. I gave up Goetic magick and dabbling with
demons, I gave up magick altogether, I threw my Crowley books in the bin and wandered,
cutting myself off from my former accomplices in the occult, wishing to expunge my
magical activities from the world. For a time I turned to the whisky bottle and wrote
covertly about my profound sense of disappointment in Yip-i-addy-i-ay!, which I handset
in lead and hand-printed and published in a limited edition of 75 copies at The
Herculaneum Press in November, 1989. (See Nash, Paul W. “Joel Biroco and The
Herculaneum Press”, pp 77–91, in the Summer 1998 issue of The Private Library, Journal
of the Private Libraries Association.)
I formally renounced magick with an oath to that effect, although, as I have found
out recently—much as a sigil will sometimes momentarily return from forgetfulness to
alight upon consciousness in the realisation of its accomplishment—such a renunciation
is essentially temporary and little more than a redefining of oneself for another purpose
and once that purpose has been achieved that oath ends, indeed, never was, for a
renunciation of magick is a magical act in itself.
For the next few years I devoted myself to Zen, painting, and other writings, such as
Slow Volcano (1993), a personal portrayal of Buddhist experience. I tied up a few loose
ends from KAOS in Kwatz! (1990) and Epoch (1991), but I avoided, largely unconsciously
it seems to me now, serious reflection on the meaning of the 156 current. One night in
July 1995 I took seven years worth of unpublished notes, prophecies, and automatic
writings associated with my previous life as an occultist, about 1000 pages, out into the
back garden and burnt them, along with about 200 paintings, mostly of demons. (In
the late 80s my rooms had my automatic drawings and paintings of demons stuck all
over them, the kind of rooms that feature on TV news stories as evidence of insanity if
7