Manufactured Memories and Immortality Through Nostalgia

Whether you're considering the way A.O. Spare immortalized himself via a potent combination of sex magick and art, or Lavey's ideas about the fountain of youth of nostalgia via erotic crystallization inertia, or any other number of immortalization theories (including apotheosis or past life regression, ascended masters ect)the key to the process is memory.

Our idea of who we are is based on memory of experience, memory which often deviates from the actuality of the events in question. People who live in the past, dwell on nostalgic memories, not the minutia of the past. Which isn't to suggest that these powerful emotional memories need be off significant events. I know people who get nostalgic over things like the smell of burnt pizza. Such powerful emotion memory connections represent a powerful magical technology.

In the realm of enchantment the evocation of these memories, or more accurately the intense nostalgia they bring can be used to induce a very powerful gnosis.

These experiences also teach us much about ourselves, what motivates us, what repels us. Careful study and controlled forays into intense nostalgia can teach us how to replicate these feelings. Therein is the real potential of nostalgia as a magical technology.

A memory with little emotional investment is fuzzy, unreal, most likely forgotten soon after the event. I have fond memories of my grandmother's pies, vivid memories which bring to the surface strong emotions, and a flood of related memories and emotions. On the other hand, while I've had pie from McDonald's, that's about all I can tell you about them, I don't even remember how they taste. I can however, through an act of will, summon up the emotional response to memories of my grandmother's pies and splice them into an entirely fictitious memory of eating a McDonald's Pie on a certain date, with certain people. I can fabricate and remember vividly whole conversations, by binding the fake memory with the "real" emotion.

What happens then, when I use this technique to fabricate the sort of memories that represent turning points in a person's development? I can change my beliefs, my habits, my experiences, myself at will. Some will argue that such tampering eradicates who we really are. I would argue that, due to the inaccuracy of memory in the first place, we are only who we think we are, independent of the "facts" at hand.

The magician has already taken to a path where he will eradicate the person he was, in the process of birthing hirself anew, why not take it one step further with the manufacture of memories?

Our ideas about essential self, the "reality" of the past, or the future for that matter, are road blocks along the path of memory modification and manufacture, but they can be passed. Faking it until you make it comes into play here. It is also "true" that actively doing this may cause you to question the "reality" of all your memories, something I would consider a worthwhile result in and of itself.

We need not stop at fabricating memories of our past, we can fabricate future memories, memories of alternate histories, and lives. At least as long as we have the experience needed to generate the requisite emotions involved in each nostalgic event. We can take it even further by manufacturing artifacts from those fabricated events, which instantly summon those feeling of nostalgia.

Careful study of our current memory patterns, will teach us what patterns must be obeyed to synthesize the sense of "realness" in the manufactured time lines.

With this technique we can fabricate a sense of continuity of consciousness through out past and future lives, effecting a sense or feeling of immortality. We can also use this ability to evoke intense nostalgia at will with other magical techniques, to transfer a part of ourselves into art work, a sigil or even a photograph, allowing us for example to remain in part forever young in a specific time/space.

Though it should be noted that such enchantments are likely to fail if the magician hasn't learned to see himself as essentially legionary in the first place. In depth work with the eight self/color magick model, or something similar, should assist with this.