Book Review - Liber Indigo
It felt like I came across Liber Indigo by Justin Kirkwood by chance, though it really may have been a good call by the YouTube algorithm (where the companion videos are posted). I was instantly intrigued; the subtitle “The Affordances of Magic” may just sound like word salad to many folks, but someone who works both in UX design and in magical practice, it jumped out at me as something combining both of my special interests. What I found wasn’t quite what I expected, but was still a very worthwhile excursion into esoteric thought.
“Affordances”, in this context, are properties of an object that show how it can be used. A handle on a door ‘affords’ pulling to open the door, a disk icon in an app ‘affords’ clicking to save the file to disk. The central focus of the book and videos is to take a deep look at the affordances we use, and the metaphors they support, and to consider how they affect our understanding of what’s really going on, and whether or not they provide us the capabilities we want.
In this context, the desktop GUI is a set of affordances on top of a lot of complicated computing equipment, that provides affordances that relate to a mid-century American office building. Kirkwood suggests that this particular interface can be rather limiting, and wonders what it’s leaving out.
Likewise, our experience of physical dimension, material object, and linear time can be considered to lay on top of a much more complex unknowable reality. They too are affordances, and not the only ones we could use. Magical systems provide other means to look at, and perhaps act on, that base reality in a different way.
Something I’d expected from the book is to extend the computer metaphor a bit deeper, to be perhaps the sort of book you might expect the Virtual Adepts to write. However, the metaphor doesn’t get extended too deeply beyond the basic application of affordances. Instead, Kirkwood’s perspective is straightforwardly idealist and panpsychist; he’s operating in what I’d call the broader Chaos Magic tradition even if he doesn’t directly use those words. Ultimately, it’s probably a good thing that the book didn’t extend the computing metaphor; I’ve never seen “reality hacking” approaches to magic hold up particularly well.
What the book does cover of magical practice is relatively simple; it reads really more as a primer on magical-system building than a deep layout of a full-fledged system. It introduces a tool for mapping reality that Kirkwood calls an Annulus, based on systems such as the wheel of the elements or the Zodiac; a set of concentric rings that divide conceptual reality into different areas, and refines those thoughts through concentric layers. Working in the chaos magic milieu, Kirkwood is quick to point out that all of these are models rather than statements of fact; they’re ways to connect your mind with the greater mind of the cosmos. The example annulus construction that the book gives is based in the color spectrum, eventually using to to derive a vocabulary for mental states and the bones of a divination system.
My own approach meshes with Kirkwood’s quite well sometimes, and diverges widely at other times. As I mentioned, the author is coming from a perspective of both idealism and panpsychism, which is similar to my own animist perspective, but is more concerned with connecting with the broader context of the universal mind. In contrast, my aim is usually to find different ways to talk to other entities, the other parts of the spiritual web of existence. In some sense, we might all indeed be the equivalent of neurons in some vast panpsychic mind, but I have never personally found that perspective useful.
Still, there was a lot about Kirkwood’s approach to magic that I found appealing. His descriptions of magic operating primarily by means of synchronicity matches up with my own experience (even if we differ on the why). My own methods of model-creation match well to Kirkwood’s annulus approach, and I think the need to find connections, interfaces, affordances, is even more important when what you’re interacting with is the vast diversity of spirits in an animist universe. Moreover, his stated reasons for doing magic were unexpectedly very resonant for me, relating back to my recent thoughts about “mysticism” vs. “sorcery”:
I tend to avoid utilizing magic for problem-solving or personal gain. I use magic to demonstrate to myself that the external world will mirror and respond to my internal world.
I had never really seen anyone describe the mystic impulse in these terms before, with magic as a tool for, essentially, experience and expression. It appeals a lot to me (in addition to my usual community-minded focus of using magic for others), and it’s been a good inspiration for me to do and try more, for magic-as-art if nothing else.
As a side-note, it’s also worth mentioning the video series too. The videos take a somewhat different focus from the book. They keep the focus somewhat more on the philosophical question of “how do our affordances shape our minds” in the sense of computers. The series still provides brief treatments of the same territories of esoteric thought, but in the end loops it back around to ask “what would it actually look like to build a computer system based on those principles” and arrives at an answer that I found to be quite well-thought-out and plausible.
If you’re at all interested in the topic of system-building in either a technical context or an esoteric one, and are willing to see how they mix together, I unreservedly recommend Liber Indigo in whatever form you’d like to experience it. Both book and video are very well-produced and digestible; a quick read/watch that may not go as deep as I expected, but still provide an inspiring starting point for a bunch of fascinating ideas.