https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-geyiv-1b64122
What does laughter have to do with magick?
Quite a bit, apparently.
In this solo episode of Hangin’ with Mist3rDouglas, I dig into Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut and isolate something that kept jumping out at me: Carroll brings up laughter again and again as an actual tool of magical practice.
Not simply because occultism could use a sense of humor, although, come on.
Carroll uses laughter in connection with banishing attachment, sigil work, gnosis, broken expectations, belief, emotional states, frightening visions, paradox, and even the way a magician receives the outcome of a working.
And that got me wondering whether laughter might be something more useful than comic relief.
Maybe it’s part of the equipment.
A little bug spray and WD-40 for attention and attachment.
Something that helps us explore wilder territory without becoming completely captured by whatever frame, belief, experience, entity, revelation, synchronicity, or “very important glowing lady” happens to show up.
We get into:
• Who Peter Carroll is and why Liber Null & Psychonaut matters to chaos magick • Why Carroll calls laughter an antidote to magical imbalance • Laughter as a banishing tool after sigil work • Humor, surprise, and the shattering of expectation • Why Carroll connects laughter with belief and psychological flexibility • Laughter in altered states and anomalous experiences • “Laugh at the terrifying vision” as a form of maintaining agency • Carroll’s ideas around Kia, gnosis, and Gnosticism • Humor, paradox, and “emotional engineering” • Doing everything possible on the physical plane before adding magick • My own 1 minute, 11 second laughter practice before stressful or uncertain situations • Why Frasier may secretly be an occult teaching document
I take this stuff seriously.
I’m just increasingly unconvinced that taking ourselves terribly seriously helps us investigate it.
I don’t think laughter doesn’t make the wild less meaningful. Maybe it keeps us loose enough to continue asking what the hell is actually going on.
Because around here we’re past the point of simply asking whether or not it’s real.
The question is: What can we do about it?
And apparently one possible answer is:
Laugh.
Thanks for Hangin.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Welcome / Why laughter?
00:25 Briefly, Who is Peter Carroll?
01:09 Why laughter matters in strange territory
02:43 Laughter as an antidote to magical imbalance
05:33 Sigils, attachment & laughter as banishment
07:25 Disrupting ordinary frames
08:39 Iconoclasm & human absurdity
09:43 Ecstatic laughter & anomalous experience
11:20 The Alphabet of Desire
11:53 Broken expectations & the Archbishop fart
14:21 “Only laughter can be gotten away with for free”
15:21 Emotional manipulation, media & staying loose
16:52 Humor, random belief & psychological anarchy
18:19 Laughing at frightening visions
20:17 Kia, consciousness & ecstatic laughter
21:41 Gnosticism & laughing at inadequate ideas of God
23:05 Laughter, paradox & emotional engineering
25:07 Attention, agency & laughing through difficult moments
26:43 Do everything possible on the physical plane first
28:07 My 1:11 laughter practice
30:46 Comedy antidotes & the occult wisdom of Frasier
33:03 Closing thoughts
Hangin With Mist3rdouglas yeah 