Excerpt: Pseudognosis

The night of my first gnosis, I was a little scared. My parents had bought me a powerful, new personal computer for my birthday, and I was putting it to good use; a carefully selected combination of video games and pornography filled my voluptuous hard-drive to its peak.

It was the latter that assisted me in my first attempt at real, honest-to-the-gods magic. I was no stranger to masturbation, but in an effort such as this I did not want to screw anything up. I was to be initiated in a few days, and I wanted at least a little bit of experience before I attempted to become a brother neophyte of the Hallowed Order of the Sacred Cube.

This was, of course, no ordinary attempt at having a wank. I’d prepared a sigil, too – that was the whole point of the exercise. The sigil is a symbol created for a specific magical purpose – applying them is one of the more basic techniques practiced by the Hallowed Order. The idea was to create a pictorial image, much like the Germanic bind runes, and charge it with the will of the magician.