I Am Legion

Perhaps it is a personal preoccupation with the history of magik and the macabre that draws me so to the chapter BECOMING-INTENSE, BECOMING ANIMAL. Particularly evocative and exciting was D+G’s discussion of the anaomalous. There is a strong connection with the concept of the anomalous with the early modern English conception of the familiar. The word familiar derives from the latin FAMILIARIS, or “household servant,” and is used in a hierarchical sense when it is found in early modern English magik texts. Generally the familiar is a type of servant, a way into another word. The familiar is the go between for the sorcerer and the beyond. The familiar acts as a channel through which ones desires are funneled through, whether those desires be to contact the dead, or to cast black enchantments, the familiar spirit (generally taking the form of an animal), acts as a guide and a medium. Leviticus 19:31; 20:6, 27; and Deuteronomy 18:9-14 speak of “mediums and familiar spirits” and forbid all involvement with them, seeing in such spirits an affront to God. The familiar is cast in the bible as a false spiritual guide. A ritual that was previously metnoymistic, with ones familiar standing in for the power of all spirits of a similar type (all cat spirits, goat spirits etc), was seen as a corruption of gods will. The familiar, according to scripture, cannot be trusted. One thinks one is combining with, or, reaping the power of a natural spiritual/animal subsect, yet in reality these spirits are only demons, doing satans bidding, perverting the actions of all who invoke them. Deuteronomy 18:10-12: “Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in [a] fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the LORD” Demons, in modern parlance, are not familiars. Familiars are bridges, they are mediums through which psychic spiritual energy is channeled. Too often  shamanistic seed-magik is conflated with dark prohibited ritual. Obviously this is intentional. There is a reason that transcendental meditation, divination, prophecy, visualization and necromancy are outlawed in scripture, but what is more interesting is that the scriptual understanding of the familiar is so off base. D+G tell us in BECOMING ANIMAL that “Becoming is certainty not imitating, or identifying with something; neither is it regressing-progressing neither is it corresponding, establishing corresponding relations; neither is it producing, producing a filiation of producing through filiation. Becoming is a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing,” “being,” “equaling,” or “producing.” (p.239) The description here of becoming is more akin to how we should understand the familiar than one would think. The familiar (though perhaps hopelessly hierarchical in man’s mastery over it), is fundamentally about ACCESS. It is about the proliferation and amplification of psychic energy. D+G write that “…we are not interested in characteristics, what interests us are MODES OF EXPANSION, PROPAGATION, OCCUPATION, CONTAGION, PEOPLING. I AM LEGION.” (p.239) The familiar is a mode of expansion that is is not a social-form but rather an extremely powerful affectual involution. Familiar magik is a strange becoming, an unnatural nuptual. It is the harnessing of energies, energies of the pack, of the mass, into oneself for a certain desired end. If the familiar differs from the anomalous it is in this assertion of an end instead of treating the means (or the mode of expansion, as D+G write) as its own end. While one could argue that the familiar is goal oriented in a way the anomalous is not, it is important to remember that contact with/exploitation of the anomalous is not considered an end in itself. We are told on p.243 that the monstrous alliance with the anomalous is a necessary precondition for the set goal of BECOMING ANIMAL. The anomalous, like the familiar has a subservient structural role to play in the means-ends equation of becoming.The anomalous, like ones interface with the familiar is concentrated on its dispersion of affects. The anomalous is all AFFECT. In this it is a phenomena of bordering insofar as it is a tension between the wall of the pack and its center. The anomalous is a door into the pack, a door into possibility, into the affectual power of the entire pack. In this sense it is precisely like the familiar, who acts as a bridge to the power of all that share its form, a form that is a means, and a means that always seeks an end.