Programming the Universe - Babalon Rising 2026

This is my fourth and final presentation from the Babalon Rising Festival this year. This material will be included in my new book Thelemic Sorcery, which I am currently in the process of writing.

There is a long history of new technologies serving as models for magical and spiritual processes. When electricity was first discovered, for example, energy work was sometimes explained as the interaction of the electric and magnetic forces. In the 1970’s the new technology was computers, and today the new technology is the Internet. Both computer programming and networking have a lot in common with how magick is generally explained, since they rely on symbolic manipulation and the transfer of information structures.

Many different models of magick, and by extension sorcery, have been proposed over the years. Some models are based on spirits doing all the work. Others are based on personal psychic abilities. Still others are based on the idea of some sort of subtle energy that magicians direct to accomplish their goals. Paranormal skeptics treat the whole process as psychological, though in my experience most people who work with practical magick do not have to do it for very long before they encounter paranormal effects of some sort.

The problem with each of these models is that they try to reduce magical effects to a single mode of operation. I have found that I can make magical operations work using only my own psychic abilities, but I get bigger probability shifts when I also call in spirits. And when I employ energy work techniques, generally Qigong in my case, it enhances the effect further. I do often describe practical magick to students as a martial art for psychic abilities, but at the same time you will not get the best effects relying on personal psychic ability alone.

A more recent model of magick is the information model, originally proposed by Patrick Dunn in his 2005 book Postmodern Magic. This model proposes that magick works by manipulating information, which is an interesting idea. However, as formulated it suffers from two key problems. First, it proposes information manipulation as a replacement for the other models, which is too reductionist. The argument that “Magick works by manipulating information, so there are no external spirits” does not follow. Presumably an external spirit can manipulate information just like a magician can. Another example of this is the argument that “Magick works by manipulating information, so energy work is ineffective.” Any magician who has done energy work knows that for practical results, it makes a huge difference.

The second problem with Dunn’s information model is that it conflates quantum information with semiotic information. There is a fundamental difference between, for example, the data stored on a hard drive and the quantum information associated with each magnetized bit. A hard drive that contains the works of Shakespeare has much more data on it than a hard drive of the same size that is blank. But the amount of quantum information on the two drives is the same because each magnetized bit – regardless of its setting – has the same amount. This is because the quantum information is the same per particle, not per bit value of 1 versus 0.

Despite those two issues, the information model is interesting enough to tinker with, and it turns out that the problems with it are not that difficult to resolve. First and most importantly, the fix requires clarification that “information” here means quantum information – the contents of the wavefunctions that determine the behavior of particles. Second, the model needs to be tweaked according to the principles of information theory rather than the principles of linguistics.

Dunn’s original information model proposed that the clarity and precision of the message itself was the main determinant of magical success. But in information theory, the message is only one component of the transmission. It also includes the concept of a carrier wave that can vary in intensity. This is the difference between the same radio signal sent by a hundred-watt transmitter versus a thousand-watt transmitter. The latter signal is stronger, even though it contains the same message. Carrier wave intensity lines up nicely with energy work – the more energy you can build up, the stronger your signal will be.

It is true that clarity and precision are important. In Thelema, this is the idea of single-pointed will. If you think of your spell as a chisel, the precision of your intent corresponds nicely to the sharpness of the point. But the energy behind that intent determines how hard you can strike, and both sharpness and strength have a role in making the tool work as designed. This results in a revision to the original information model, which I refer to in this book as the quantum information model. This is not me using “quantum” as a synonym for “awesome” as many New Age sources like to do. Rather, it is an important qualifier that distinguishes between the quantum information that governs the behavior of particles and information such as data or language.

This quantum information model includes the key ideas from the information model and resolves the practical problems that come with most other models of magick. The psychological-only model is refuted by the mere existence of paranormal effects from spells. The psychic-only model is refuted by the observation that magical operations that call on spirits produce larger effects than operations that do not include them. The spirit-only model is refuted by the observation that the personal power of the magician strongly correlates to the intensity of magical results. And the energy-only model is refuted by the significance of single-pointed will and unambiguous intent for obtaining the results you want.

None of these refutations apply to psychology, psychic ability, spirits, or energy. Rather, what they refute is “only.” The quantum information model is useful because it provides a meta-framework in which all these aspects can co-exist. Magick is a holistic discipline that incorporates many different methods, with the main commonality being consciousness itself. I believe that trying to reduce the operation of magick to one of these several mechanisms is doomed to failure. It is necessary to transcend the limitations of each to create a truly inclusive and accurate model of paranormal events and spiritual arts.

This is a foundational way in which ideas from information technology can be applied to magical operations, to lay out a general model that provides a framework for all sorts of different kinds of operations with a wide variety of parameters. Once we have this model defined, we can go further in terms of developing advanced magical ideas.

As an object-oriented programmer, I find the idea of an Instance to be helpful in terms of explaining magical effects. When you work with spirits, one of the seeming strange observations you wind up making is that two magicians can call the same spirit at the same time and both get paranormal results. Ad I mentioned in my previous talk on Thelemic Thaumaturgy, Aleister Crowley proposed in 1903 that one possible solution to this paradox was to regard evoked spirits as portion of the human brain. He would later go on to revise this opinion considerably, but as a first attempt it does acknowledge that there is something about the combination of magician and spirit that produces a unique manifestation, even if the spirit evoked by both is the same.

Object-oriented programming, as the name implies, involves working with objects and instances of objects. An base object is often referred to as a Class in object-oriented languages. An example would be a class called Address which includes the following properties: Address1, Address2, City, State, and Zip. In a program you start by defining the class:

Class Address
{
   String Address1
   String Address2
   String City
   String State
   Numeric Zip
}

But then there is another step. You do not just start populating your address class like:

Address.Address1 = “4093 Boone Hollow Road”

And so forth. Instead, you create an instance of your class in the program with a statement something like this:

Address MyAddress = New Address()

You now have an instance of type Address inherited from the base class. Once you have this instance created, you can work with it like this:

MyAddress.Address1 = “4093 Boone Hollow Road”
MyAddress.Address2 = “”
MyAddress.City = “Springville”
MyAddress.State = “Indiana”
MyAddress.Zip = 47462

The base class can be thought of as a template that is used to create the instance. The instance is what does all the actual work.

Now apply this idea to a spirit. The “base class” is the spirit itself in its native form, a sort of nonlocal consciousness wave loosely linked to photonic energy. The act of conjuration creates an instance or version of this spirit that is localized and directly related to both the consciousness of the magician and its own native form. Obviously as many of these instances can exist as there are operations, let alone magicians.

This easily explains how different magicians can conjure the same spirit at the same time without creating a contradiction. The spirit is the same, but each instance is unique. This is a far better model than Crowley’s 1903 speculation that demons might be portions of the human brain. Not only can we be pretty sure that there is no “demonic” part of the brain thanks to advanced EEG scans and functional MRI’s, evidence also shows that rituals calling on spirits result in larger probability shifts than rituals relying solely on the psychic power of the magician.

If the spirit is simply a psychological abstraction, how can this work? Presumably if the entire magical effect originates with the magician’s psychic ability, why would working with a spirit make any difference? Another key point is that the psychoanalytic “unconscious mind,” one of the few possible explanations for how a spirit could originate with a magician and still be more powerful than they are consciously, does not exist. Or at least there is no evidence from modern neuroscience research that suggests it does. The brain does unconscious processing in the form of conditioning loops, but none of that resembles regular cognition in any way.

All of this is important to understand in order to allow us to optimize magical techniques the same way a programmer can optimize a computer program. There are magicians in the world who thrive on long, involved, layered operations, seeming to enjoy the experience of doing magick maybe even more than they enjoy the results themselves. I take the opposite approach. I want to work with simple, modular designs that produce the best possible results with the least amount of effort. That’s because we all have a certain amount of time and a certain amount of magical power available at any given moment. Spirits literally add power to an operation. If they did not, from an optimal perspective there would be no reason to include the additional complexity they bring to magical operations.

Charges in magick can be constructed just like computer programs, with arbitrary levels of complexity. So when working magick, do not feel that you need to limit yourself to a single simple statement. A charge has two key components, an Injunction and a Limitation. The injunction is what you want the operation to do, and the limitation is what you do not want it to do. The injunction can be whatever the main objective of the ritual is. The limitation is generally used to exclude paths by which the injunction could manifest in an undesirable way, such as preventing the operation from harming your loved ones in any way. This means the limitation usually consists of a simple statement.

The injunction, on the other hand, can be very involved, with the potential for conditional operations based on environmental conditions. The key understanding here is that magical operations do exactly as they are told, just like computer programs do. They are literally incapable of doing anything else. Some forms of magick, like the scholastic image magick from the Picatrix, is powered entirely by the astrological aspect under which they are constructed, and as a result a flawed election can produce a negative version of what the positive intent was supposed to be. This is not so with explicit, complex charges. Even a terrible astrological aspect will result in a very low-power operation trying to accomplish the exact charge. It is likely to fail under those circumstances, but not in any way that would produce a negative effect that is different from the exact wording of the charge.

An elaborate example of a “programmed” operation was created by my magical partner and me back in 2003. We call it “the glyph,” based on an idea from a text called “The Book of the Glyph” describing a similar operation that was done in Portland. It consists of a set of talismans, one for each planet, all linked together and placed around the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These were linked to a servitor-like created entity that was “written” using a custom programming language that I designed to precisely dictate its behavior. It transfers and balances magical energy across the various points and also makes the full extent of that energy available to magicians. It can also be used to shift the energy over the metro area to that of a particular planet, which amplifies related magical effects. I also integrated orgone radionics into the design, linking one of the talismans to a powered orgone generator to energize the region.

Thelemic magick is built around the concept of the magical child, which is a technique for creating entities independent of the magician that can work on their own. When I first read Crowley’s De Thaumaturgia, which I presented on here at Babalon Rising in 2024, I was struck by how impressed he was with this method, writing that while other forms of magick could drain the vitality of the magician, this method did not. Having studied some of the ideas surrounding the depletion of Qi in relation to health, and also understanding that much of that lore was based on a misunderstanding of biology, I largely wrote it off. It was only when I dug deeper into the implications of it from a ritual design perspective that I started to understand Crowley’s reaction.

A powerful individual magician can create a probability shift of around 100 to 1 against based on measurements I have made over the years. That sounds pretty good – you can often make an event happen that is only one percent likely to occur. But if you take a look at all the mythic claims made in the magical lore, this is just not that impressive. The magical child technique, when taken to its logical conclusion, is far more powerful and may be able to set in motion effects that resemble more closely the stories of old. The key is that the method is unconstrained by the psychic power of an individual magician, or even a group of magicians.

Magical children can build energy on their own and grow stronger over time when constructed properly. In addition, it is simple to create multiple magical children to accomplish the same task. As I mentioned in my talk on Revisiting the Equations of Magick, an independent entity can operate with about 80% the effectiveness of a direct operation, with the trade-off being that you can create as many as you want. When you do this the probability shifts of all the magical children working on a task can be added together to get the final result. This requires a charge that explicitly prohibits them from getting in each others’ way, but this is one simple additional instruction that is not difficult to implement.

You can also create multiple magical children like this to accomplish different aspects of a particular task, and again, the probability shifts of all of them can be added together. This is especially nice if a task includes components that can be assigned to different planets, such as a set of prosperity talismans where one is attributed to Mercury for commerce, another to Jupiter for luck and prosperity, and another to the Sun to facilitate acquiring wealth. Sets like this rarely interfere with each other since they all work with different aspects, and it also allows planets like Mercury and Jupiter to work together despite their natural antagonism. That antagonism is rooted in astrology - Jupiter is in detriment in the signs Mercury rules, Gemini and Virgo, while Mercury is in detriment in the signs Jupiter rules, Sagittarius and Pisces.

Multiple magical children working on the same task is one way that magick might be used to win a lottery jackpot. We know that the odds of a jackpot win in a major lottery are something like a hundred million to one against, far beyond the probabilities that magicians can normally shift. But instead of a single operation, build a magical child with the charge to make one number out of a set of six come up. Create 5 others to do the same, one for each number. The numbers range from something like 1 to 65, so if each of the magical children can overcome 80-1 odds that should be sufficient to bring up its assigned number.

These can be built and effectively “programmed” in a computer-like generic way. I currently am working on putting together my set, since they are attributed to Jupiter and I want good astrological conditions for all of them. The central “command” for them is as follows: “When I touch this talisman with my right index finger and say a number, you will cause that number to be selected in the lottery drawing corresponding to the ticket in which you are in physical contact.” That way you can do a quick pick ticket and set each one for any number, and the probability will be shifted in that number’s direction. Six individual 80-to-1 shifts can add up to something greater than a 100 million to 1 shift, which is pushing into mythic magical territory. And a lottery is just an obvious, computable example. This method can be applied in just about any situation in which the steps and shifts are reasonably well understood.

As a point, if anybody here wants to give this lottery trick a try, let me know how it goes. As I understand it the festival could use the money for various improvements, and what could be more appropriate for a Thelemic magick festival than using Thelemic magick to fund those improvements?

This idea can be taken even further. In theory magical children can reproduce on their own. A thought experiment along those lines resulted in something I call a “Von Neumann Servitor,” named after physicist John von Neumann. Von Neumann proposed what is known as a “Von Neumann machine,” a self-replicating piece of technology. The original idea behind this was to create a space probe that could make copies of itself from raw materials, for example by mining in the asteroid belt. These machines could enable rapid space exploration by multiplying their numbers and exploring in different directions. In a magical context, this can be represented as a magical child that can duplicate itself, creating another independent entity that has the same abilities and independent source of magical power.

The ramifications there might not be obvious, but let’s say you have a task to accomplish that is far beyond the 100-to-1 limit. Creating a magical child that spends half its time performing the task it is charged with and half its time replicating itself yields probability numbers that are off the chart, kind of like the idea of giving somebody a penny and then doubling that amount each day for next thirty days versus giving the same person a million dollars. The penny doubled for thirty days will pay them a lot more due to the power of compounding amounts. Probability is likewise additive with multiple magical children in the works, which suggests this idea should work if designed properly. This is a lot like the idea of forking processes using a computer, which can keep doing more work until computing resources are exhausted.

As far as resources go, magical children can draw on and transmute many different kinds of energy, psychic and otherwise. Some of this work was done with servitors back on the old alt.magick.chaos newsgroup on UseNet in the 1990’s, if any of you were around for that. A servitor is basically the same thing as a magical child but constructed (1) from the magician’s power only, rather than that of the magician plus a spirit and (2) generally created using sigil magick. One the key pieces of information that I picked up there is how to create arbitrarily complex charges for operations that work a lot like small computer programs. You can program your magical child to feed itself off a particular kind of energy, which allows it not only to sustain itself but to grow and become stronger.

The growth process is one way to circumvent the probability limitations for direct operations. Charging your magical child to increase its power as it feeds falls right in line with the Thelemic formula of life and growth. The energy source generally needs to be something that can flow from a higher state to a lower state to line up with the principles of thermodynamics. But this is not that difficult. Imagine a healing talisman powered by inflammation. Inflammation is an often pathological energetic process in the human body, and energy can this be liberated by returning this state to baseline.

There are many other possibilities for this. Emotional energy can power one of these magical children as well. You could, for example, build a prosperity talisman that feeds on strong negative emotions. Not only will negative emotions often impede your success and/or resolve, they also represent a deviation from baseline emotional state from which power can be extracted. This sort of magical child works in two ways that reinforce each other. By draining energy from negative emotions it lessens them in such a way that they result in fewer obstacles to success. The power drawn then feeds the magical child so it can grow and also empowers it to create fortunate circumstances around you. This provides better results than either process on its own.

Combining this energy harvesting with self-replication might even be able to do something as dramatic as save the world. I currently am working on a viable design for this, so some of this is preliminary. But I figured I would share anyway. There is a thought experiment in physics called “Maxwell’s Demon.” Maybe some of you have heard of it. The idea is that you have a box with two chambers and a small door connecting them. The “demon” is a hypothetical creature that operates the door. When the demon sees a slow-moving particle approaching the door from the right side to the left side, it opens the door for the particle. When the demon sees a fast-moving particle approaching the door from the left side to the right side, it opens the door for that particle. Otherwise the door stays closed.

The idea, then, is that fast particles are sorted to the right side and slow particles to the left, which warms the right side and cools the left side. The key thing that the demon needs to do this is information. It needs to know the speed of each particle as it approaches, which is a difficult thing to do using regular technology. So far, I know of no one who has managed to build a heater/cooler based on this principle. Gases reach equilibrium in the real world, and particle-by-particle measurement disturbs each particle it measures.

But consider a spirit – a manifestation of consciousness weakly linked to energy that can act on probability. It might be able to perceive particles without disturbing them. Then, it could affect the probability waves of those particles at the quantum level so that position/momentum could approach a particular value. The shift is going to be small, possibly too small to easily measure in a tabletop laboratory apparatus. But then imagine a whole army of these things built using the power of self-replication.

Build them to feed on sunlight, and use that as a principle resource to grow and self-replication, split about 50/50 between sorting particles and increasing their numbers. Send them into the upper atmosphere and charge them to sit at the boundary of the atmosphere. When they see a fast particle they accelerate it into space. When they see a slow particle, redirect it back towards the Earth. This will cool the atmosphere. Not very much, of course, for one of these magical children, but if they spend half their time multiplying and half their time sorting particles there will soon be millions if not billions of them. You could charge them to bring global temperatures down a few degrees and hold them there indefinitely, negating climate change with enough of them.

And that is just one idea where magick could have a significant impact on our civilization with the right sort of “programming.”

Magick has contributed to significant events in history and I have no doubt that it will do so again. In Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy I discuss the speculation that John Dee may have used the Heptarchia Mystica to help defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588. Had Britain been conquered by the Spanish, all of our history would be completely different. Programming and design of magical operations facilitates these sorts of events, and provides us with powerful tools to accomplish real change. Design your ritual operations with ingenuity and dare to implement intents with the potential to transform the world. Your efforts will be well rewarded.