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One of my favorite things that happened during the campaign is we were mentioned on All Things Apocalyptic and This Week in Creepy Robots.

Now my friends and I have a lot of work ahead of us. For those who contributed, I will be in touch soon re when to expect various perks. Further updates on this project will be transmitted through IndieGoGo.

Thanks again!

1. Go to the hyperRitual Facebook page, find the post about this article, and (a) like it, (b) share it, and (c) leave a comment on it.
2. (a) Leave a comment below this article (be sure to include your email address so I can notify you if you win; it will not be published), then (b) go to the Robomancy.com page at IndieGoGo and share the campaign on Facebook, Google+, and/or Twitter.

I will randomly select one winner on Monday, February 6.

The following article explains how to use MRN to make a robot fetish for magical work.

Step 1: Determine the robot’s purpose

The first thing you must do is decide what task your robot will accomplish. What is your magical intent? That will become the robot’s magical purpose. Do you or a loved one need healing, or do you wish to remove some obstacle from your life? Will the robot help you acquire a new job, a new lover, or arcane secrets? Whatever it is, figure it out before you begin building your robot, so that the robot’s function can guide the form you choose for it (but you can remain flexible to new functions inspired by discovering what forms are available to you).

Tip! General-purpose magic servitors may be like general-purpose physical robots: a wonderful idea, but difficult to implement in practice. Consider creating different robots for different tasks, so that each robot can be well-suited to its unique task.

Step 2: Join MyRobotNation.com

Create a free account at MyRobotNation.com, then follow the link to Make My Robot.

You will need to have WebGL enabled in your web browser to use MRN’s modelling tools. MRN has some troubleshooting info if you experience problems with this. (FWIW, I personally have not been able to get WebGL to work correctly in Firefox, but I have no problem in Chrome on the same machine.)

Step 3: Build your robot’s body

MRN has a varriety of heads, arms, torsos, and legs for you to choose from. Consider how your robot’s physical attributes can represent its magical qualities. A slow-but-steady robot might move on continuous track, or a fast-acting robot could have long legs for running. A robot built for destroying obstacles might have a ray gun for a hand, or the same could represent a device for emitting rays of healing energy. Does your robot’s face appear friendly or menacing?

Step 4: Color your robot

Each robot body part can be painted one or two colors. Select colors you find pleasing or meaningful, or that have esoteric correspondences. One scheme I have used is selecting the colors corresponding to the planetary day and hour that best represents the robot’s magical purpose (which is also a good time to “charge” the robot — see below). E.g., if my robot’s magical purpose is to destroy an obstacle, I might select red for Mars (war) and black for Saturn (death). Or if its purpose is to heal something or someone, I might select a color corresponding to the Zodiacal sign governing the physical system I wish to heal.

Here are some books to assist with esoteric color correspondences, and they are also helpful for choosing symbols to embellish your robot (see step 5):

• The Complete Magician’s Tables
• The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order
• The Key of Solomon the King
• The Magician’s Companion: A Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to Magical and Religious Symbolism
• The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages
• Three Book of Occult Philosophy

You can mix your own colors in MRN, or have your robot painted white (or some other base color) so that you can complete it with your own paints at home.

Step 5: Embellish your robot

You can add 3D parts to your robot: nuts, bolts, pipes, keys, visors, saw blades, neckties… These can be colored just like body parts.

MRN includes a variety of 2D graphics (called stamps) to print onto your robot, including letters, numbers, and the signs of the Zodiac. You can resize or rotate any stamp to your desired placement. Custom stamps are not allowed at this time, but you can leave a blank space on the robot for painting one of your own design at home.

Tip! The four classical elements or Tarot suits can be represented by modern-day card suits: Clubs (Wands, Fire), Hearts (Cups, Water), Spades (Swords, Air), and Diamonds (Pentacles, Earth). MRN has both 3D parts and 2D stamps representing these card suits.

Step 6: Order your robot

Once you have complete your 3D model, MRN will ship it to your doorstep. You can find pricing information on their website.

Step 7: Charge your robot

After you have received your new robot from MRN, you must ritually “charge” it with its magical task. There are many methods for activating magic artifacts, written in many books on this subject. Some are quite simple while others call for elaborate rituals. For those having no preferred method, I have included one here that is based on Phillip H. Farber’s Meta-Magick techniques.

1. Imagine a circle on the floor, about as wide as your outstretched arms. Place the robot just beyond the edge of the circle, in the center of an imaginary triangle.
2. Stand in the center of your circle and take three deep breaths. As you inhale, imagine your awareness expanding to fill the entire circle; as you exhale, imagine your awareness contracting to a single point in the center of your being.
3. Whatever you wish the robot to accomplish, imagine that it has already taken place. What do you see happening? What objects or people or places do you see, and in what states are they in? What do you hear? Are there any sounds in the aftermath of accomplishment? What do you feel? Do you feel any emotions or any sensation in your body?
4. Notice where in your body this feeling is located. (If you have trouble intuiting a location, you can select one of esoteric correspondence, e.g. one of the chakras appropriate for your situation.) Is it static there, or does it move, and if so, how does it move? Does it pulse or circulate or flow?
5. Assign this feeling a color or colors. (If you have trouble intuiting a color, you can select one of esoteric correspondence, possibly matching one of your robot’s colors.) Imagine that color suffusing the area where the feeling is located.
6. Amplify this color-feeling energy. Imagine the color become more and more brilliant while it grows to envelop your entire body. Notice how the energy feels as it grows, and whether there are any changes in how or where it moves.
7. In whatever way feels natural to you, project the energy onto the robot in the triangle. Notice how the energy interacts with the robot, and whether the robot changes at all in your mind. Continue until you feel all of the energy has been transferred from you to the robot. At this time, you may talk with the robot if you feel to, speaking instructions to it or asking it questions.
8. Repeat #2 (breathing in the circle).

From now on, take care to properly handle the robot as a magic artifact.

You can elaborate the above ritual with special lights, sounds, the smell of incense, drawing an actual circle and triangle on the ground and inscribing them with magic words and glyphs, etc., or you can adapt some other ritual or compose one entirely of your own design.

Step 8: ?

Magic is about changing the state or essence of persons, objects, acts and events through certain special and non-trivial kinds of actions with opaque causal mediation. // Jesper Sørensen, A Cognitive Theory of Magic

Place your robot somewhere that feels right to you for the work it needs to do, and let it do its thing. No one is certain of exactly how this works, and you need not puzzle over it. Do not worry about whether or not the robot will accomplish its task, or even think much about it. Just trust that it will, and get on about your other business. After all, this is why you have robots!

Step 9: Profit!

If all went well, your intent is not too improbable for the robot to act on, and you keep a sufficiently open mind about such things, then you should receive a meaningful (sometimes spooky) result of some kind. Exactly when can be difficult to predict, but if needed you can give the robot a time limit when you charge it. If you do get a result, thank your robot for a job well done, and decide what do with it next (reuse or recycle — following an appropriate discharge if necessary). If not, consider what you might do differently to improve things. Are you asking for too much? Are you satisfied with the robot’s design? With your charging ritual? Try asking the robot what it needs or wants to accomplish the task.

That’s It!

You have taken your first steps toward becoming a robomancer. Other examples at Robomancy.com will involve more elaborate rituals and actual robots that move about and such. If you like this sort of thing, please contribute to our fundraiser. And don’t forget to enter the contest for a gift robot from MyRobotNation.com!

I have just launched a fundraising campaign for the Robomancy.com online book (Robomancy in Theory and Practice) and community (Robomancers’ Guild). Please visit indiegogo.com/robomancy to learn more!

The Kymera magic wand builds on this mythical tradition, to create a novel(ty) television remote control — change channels or volume with a turn or flick of your wrist, or execute a “big swish” to turn the TV on or off.

But the Kymera wand can interact with much more than your A/V components. Today’s techno-wizards — the hackers and makers — use “hidden forces” (i.e. small computers) called microcontrollers to effect their desired changes in the world. These microcontrollers can be programmed to respond to infrared remote-control devices including the Kymera wand.

On Friday, February 17, from 7 to 9 pm, I will be at Jigsaw Renaissance, demonstrating how to use the Kymera wand to interact with two popular microcontrollers: Arduino and the Parallax Propeller. I will briefly introduce infrared communications technology including the popular Sony protocol, and will demonstrate the wand’s 13 gestures that produce discrete signals, and a few applications including robot control, interaction with a Processing computer program, and lighting effects using BlinkM programmable LEDs. Suggested donation: $5 for members of Jigsaw Renaissance, $10 for non-members.

The magical purpose of the talisman is to give “great knowledge and wisdom in mechanical arts,” and it features the sigil of the Goetic demon Barbas (or Marbas). It shows also the hammer and anvil of Tubal Cain, and a classical symbol for fire indicating Hephaestus/Vulcan. Its practical purpose is to experiment with the media. The proper talismachines will be screen-printed on parchment or canvas, and will include a LilyPad microcontroller for more interesting interactions. I may need to run conductive thread behind the parchment, because the Bare Paint rapidly increases its resistance over the lines.

Click here for more photos.

The lovely Severina and Logan playing with Electronomicon

Preparing to control the audio for Orryelle’s performance

Standing next to my alchemy teacher, Robert Allen Bartlett

I would love to see online, collaborative communities emerge around this sort of thing. Like the community of psionic machine enthusiasts that developed in and around Astounding Science Fiction (and later, Analog) in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, but more distributed and accessible. I would love to see it be open-source. Perhaps an interactive catalog of designs, like SourceForge for software, or Open Design Engine for open-source hardware (congratulations to those guys for a successful Kickstarter, BTW). Arduino lets you add knobs, buttons, and switches to pretty much anything—from cigar boxes to t-shirts. Or how about “soft” radionic devices running on our mobile telephones and tablet computers? My imagination boggles at the variety of apps one could develop for these media.

Who’s with me?

I believe that the totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the cephalopods, the squids and octopi, have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. In the not-too-dstant future men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea. // Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival

More from the same book:

What is not well known is the communication model that is happening in the octopus. Octopi change their color not for camouflage purposes, as might be supposed, but as a mode of communication. The blushes, spots, and traveling bands of color that an ordinary octopus can manifest are reflective of its linguistic intent. Its language appears on the surface of its skin.

Ordinarily, telepathy is imagined to be you hearing me think, then me hearing you think. But a richer notion of telepathy would be if you could see my words, rather than hear them—if they were actually sculptural objects where I would make an utterance, then you and I would stand and regard this utterance from all angles. There would be no ambiguity. And this is exactly what is going on with the octopi. Shamans do the same thing. These shamanist songs that are sung are not intended to be heard, they are intended to be seen by other people who are intoxicated. This crossing from the heard to the seen is a very important part of the revelation of the transcendental object.

Philo Judeus, the second-century Alexandrian Jew and polymath (a person knowledgeable in many fields) who wrote encyclopedic tomes on the religions of his day, talks about what he calls a more perfect Logos. And he asks, what would be a more perfect Logos? And he answers his own question by saying, “The more perfect Logos is a Logos that goes from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a quantifiable moment of transition.” And I think this is a perfect example of the kind of historical development that I am trying to indicate by talking about the transcendental object. That we are going to go from a linguistic mode that is heard to a linguistic mode that is beheld, and when this transition is complete, the ambiguity, the uncertainty and the subterfuge that haunts our efforts at communication will become impossible and obsolete. And it will be in this environment of beheld communication that the new world of the Logos will be realized.

[…]

Consider: Nature offers the example of the octopus, a creature in which well-developed eyes and an ability to change the color, banding, and general appearance of the skin surface have favored a visual, and hence telepathic, form of communication. An octopus does not communicate with spoken words as we do, even though water is a good medium for acoustical signaling; rather, the octopus becomes its own linguistic intent. The octopus is like a naked nervous system, say rather a naked mind: the inner states, the thoughts, if you will, of the octopus are directly reflected in its outward appearance. It is as though the octopus were wearing its mind on its exterior. This is in fact the case. The octopus literally dances its thoughts through expression of a series of color changes and position changes that require no loca linguistic conventions for understanding as do our words and sentences. In the world of the octopus to behold is to understand. Octopi have a large repertoire of color changes, dots, blushes, and traveling bars that move across their surfaces; this ability in combination with the soft-bodied physique of the creature allows it to obscure and reveal its linguistic intent simply by rapidly folding and unfolding different parts of its body. The octopus does not transmit its linguistic intent, it becomes its linguistic intent. The mind and the body of the octopus are the same and are equally visible. This means that the octopus wears its language like a kind of second skin; it appears to be and becomes what it seeks to mean. There is very little loss of definition or signal strength among communicating octopi. Indeed, their well-known use of “ink” clouds to conceal themselves may indicate that this is the only way that they can have anything like a private thought. The ink cloud may be ad of correction fluid for voluble octopi who have misspoken themselves. Like the octopus, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of a more perfect Logos, a Logos not heard but beheld. VR can help here, for electronics can change vocal utterance into visually beheld colored output in the virtual reality.

This output can then be manipulated, by tools still uncreated, tools to be found in the kit of the VR hacker/mechanic soon to be. This means that a three-dimensional syntax, one that is seen, not heard, becomes possible as an experience in VR. You may ask, What is the point of being able to see one’s voice, even in virtual reality? The point is that others will be able to see it as well, that the ambiguity of invisible meanings that attends audio speech is replaced by the unambiguous topology of meanings beheld. At last we will truly see what we mean. And we will see what others mean too, for cyberspace will be a dimension where anything that can be imagined can be made to seem real.

When we are in the act of seeing what is meant, the communicator and the one cmmunicated with become as one. In other words, the visible languages possible in VR will overcome the subject/object dualism as well as the Self/Other dualism.

Automagica Theoretica has been going very well; my most popular course to date. I have proposed several more courses to the Arcanorium staff, for later this year or next. I should also be putting on the “Controlling the World with a Magic Wand” class at Jigsaw Renaissance, soon.

I am writing an article about using Conceptual Blending as a ritual design tool especially when mapping between magic and technology.

Edited 2011.11.28.20.39: Still planning the robomancy project. In addition to the Parallax S2, I will be featuring Guilherme Martin’s Farrusco (first mentioned on hyperRitual here) and some other Arduino-based robots.

The robomancy stuff will coincide with a series of demonstrations in (mostly gestural) interfaces for manipulating magic symbols, which will also be developed with Arduino and Processing.

I do not have any new tech to show off right now, but here are a couple of Daniel Schulke prints I recently had framed, that inspire the magical (especially, witchy) aspects of my work.