The Nightmare Bomb

A how-to in malefic esoteric vandalism

Three shall be the number that thou count, and the number that thou count shall be three.

I’ve written at some length in the distant past of this blog of a ritual working that I abandoned due to the sheer scope of it. I call it The Astarte Working and it has more or less characterized my Will in spite of the many lurches to and fro that I tend to make in states of mania. I talk about it a lot and until recent chats with Marco Visconti and the folks from The Liminal Map, I had never considered it much more than a side project that keeps mutating or evolving over time. Back in the day, when I was ferociously working chaos magic, I cooked up the initial plan:

• Signal to Sirius that I am their brother from another mother.

• Perform a ritual where invited audience members were to be caught up in a mass UFO abduction.

• Place a matrix of sigils over the map of a nearby town that, when activated, would plunge the area into a permanent state of strangeness.

This was to be an act of defiance in the face of real estate speculators that have torn down the community and banished local culture. The coincidence of these new, soulless luxury graveyard monoliths appearing and the moving away of local artists and musicians cannot be overstated.

I eventually moved away from chaos as the, ahem, chaos was getting to be a little too much and an escalation of crazy shit was happening around the house, putting people at risk. But this was a long time ago and I didn’t know shit about shit back then. I was just another one of these internet chaotes, going house on the anything-goes current. Nowadays I am a much more advanced ceremonial magician with a handle on how shit works and how to make it happen without getting it on everyone around me. My experiment with The Weird Bottle, a sort of abbreviated version of this working has been an interesting success, having dropped two bottles thus far: one at the 1614 monument that I claimed as consecrated ground (with actual blood, no less) for The Esoteric Order of Dagon, and one at the graves of Betty and Barney Hill.

Transmitting and Receiving High-Strangeness

The days following their deployment were struck with a sudden upsurge in magical creativity and a new outlook on the occult. I’ve been following through on my podcast, Fear is the Mind Killer, landed some extremely cool guests for upcoming unreleased episodes, I’ve been writing on magic a ton and started writing a book, even, on the very topic that has taken over the direction of my work and is coming to define True Will territory. I think it’s time that I upped the ante and started thinking bigger. With the release of the book I will officially plant a flag and launch the esoteric anarchist cabal that I’ve always dreamed about and The Astarte Working will be the proof of concept that defines the cabal’s operating parameters. The plan has changed a little and the one outlined above is as outdated as my old chaos practice and the new outline will remain a secret. But I will reveal one piece of it, the central weapon of the plan. A magical talisman that I call The Nightmare Bomb.

This represents a major shift in the work that I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. The temple is currently disassembled since some filthy mundanes were down in the basement doing maintenance work and I didn’t need them coming back up, thinking that they just checked the sprinkler system around a hidden Spirit Cooking temple. So when I go to set it back up, I’m stripping it of the Knights Templar stuff that I currently have set up and will be giving it a makeover that is suitably spooky, according to the much darker current of the Esoteric Order of Dagon. It’s going to be the balls-out haunted house setup that I’ve always dreamed of in order to facilitate the creation of this monstrous talisman.

Ingredients

• One sweet-ass bottle that looks like it belongs in a wizard’s laboratory

• Cork

• Water

• Stones

• Sealing wax

• Black velvet bag

I bought the bottle at a witch pop-up show that a friend of mine held last Halloween and it’s just sort of been kicking around ever since, waiting to be used. Sure, I could have just grabbed a mason jar or whatever, but aesthetic goes a long way in reinforcing the magical properties of the stuff you work on. Why go with something that you could also store pickles in when there’s an IRL item from Skyrim right there?

Unlike The Weird Bottle, which was full of a lot of stuff, the intention of The Nightmare Bomb is much different. The Weird Bottle was meant to move energy from one place to another. The Nightmare Bomb is meant to contain energy until it’s released. So, the condition of the bottle and its cleanliness is a serious concern. The static vibes on it as it stands right now won’t do and neutralizing it for its next purpose is a priority. To do this, I first smudged it inside and out and also hit the cork with those dank tendrils of burning sage. Then I grabbed a bag of sea salt out of my wife’s witch cabinet and a bottle of vinegar from our, uh, regular cabinet. Salt is a well-known crystal used for purification as well as cleaning. So I poured a bit in the bottle, gave it a splash of vinegar and sloshed it around inside the bottle for a couple of minutes before dumping the nasty-ass slurry in the trash. It worked extremely well. I gave it a couple of rinses and then moved on to the next step.

I filled the bottle up to about 90% and then poured the water into a pan to boil. I was satisfied that I’d sterilized the interior of the bottle well, so the next step was to reduce any contaminants in the water by boiling them to death. This thing is going to ultimately be sealed once full and I’d really rather not have mold and other shit growing in there in the meantime, so the most sterile conditions possible are a must.

At one time, among my daily rituals in the temple was one where I walked the circle clockwise, chanting a mantra in Hebrew, drawing down energy from The Above and redirecting it into the temple space in a visualized tornado of white light. A particularly psychic friend of mine once sat at the table in our dining room and remarked that she was getting the impression of a tall column of white light shooting up through the floor. That’s because the circle and altar were directly below us. So it works.

I intend to do something similar for the bomb.

I’ll circumambulate the temple, but this time the mantra will be a phrase drawn from the Abzu deck. I shuffled the deck and drew a card randomly to see what that mantra would be and just about passed out when, of all the cards I could have chosen, I pulled the 23 card. 23 is an vital number in the EOD current and the mantra reads:

Mystically magnetized, invoking a quantum gateway

Perfect.

Rather than draw down the light, I will instead draw up all of the nightmare creations of my subconscious and project them into the bottle. As fucked up as this may sound, I intend to induce nightmares as I sleep, record them in my magical journal and then as I walk the temple, I’ll bring them all to mind and project them into the bottle. I checked in with GM Tornasuk from the EOD for tips on how I might do that and short of some degree work that I don’t yet qualify for, he gave me some advice on how I might make this happen regularly enough to charge the bomb daily. Now, I want to be clear here. The point of this is not to fill the bottle with malice. This is a malefic experiment, for sure, but I have no intention of doing anything evil with this. There’s enough evil out there in the world, I don’t need to add more to it. The contents of this bottle will, in fact, be quite nasty, but I intend to put scares and troublemakers in there rather than truly malicious entities that will cause harm.

The contents of this bottle will be released in a single reveal. There won’t be a concussive blast or fireworks or any of that action movie shit. It’ll be nothing more than shattered glass and water on the ground, but the release will be every bit as explosive as the word bomb implies.

To give these astral bad-actors the sensation of being at home in the bottle, I’ve added some stones to the mix that radiate the same sort of malefic vibes that they’re used to.

Crystals aren’t really my scene, but I consulted with a friend of mine for these darker stones and she turned up a few that associated the nightmarish qualities of The Morrigan along with two selections of my own. From top to bottom:

• Black Tourmaline

• Snowflake Obsidian

• Tektike

• Smoky Quartz

• Trinitite

Tektite and Trinitite were my picks. A big unspoken part of this working is a signaling to alien intelligences, hence the presence of Allen Greenfield’s absolutely crucial text, The Complete Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts. Tektite is formed under the heat and pressure of a meteorite crashing into the earth and therefore carries with it an “information from out there” vibe and Trinitite is a very rare, very special stone.

Trinitite

Trinitite is named for the only place on earth that you’ll find it: Alamagordo, New Mexico, or more specifically: Trinity Site.

Under the extreme heat and pressure of the world’s first atomic bomb test, the elements of the desert that weren’t vaporized were fused into a glassy substance that is crystal-like but such as with everything associated with Manhattan Project, it has some extremely peculiar qualities to it.

Contained within the glass are melted bits of the first atomic bomb and the support structures and various radionuclides formed during the detonation. The glass itself is marvelously complex at the tens to hundreds of micrometre scale, and besides glasses of varying composition also contains unmelted quartz grains. Air transport of the melted material led to the formation of spheres and dumbbell shaped glass particles. Similar glasses are formed during all ground level nuclear detonations and contain forensic information that can be used to identify the atomic device.

Robert Hermes, Trinitite — The Atomic Rock

Yes. There are microscopic pieces of the actual Gizmo, the test bomb, itself, fused into the glass, along with the tower that held it and basically everything else that melted and recombined in the nuclear furnace of the blast. But the weirdness doesn’t end there. When subjected to a beam of x-rays, the diffraction of the light resulted in this image.

Dude.

WHAT???

Sacred geometry spontaneously occurred in a chemical reaction created by mankind. It took the form of a crystalline structure that is many times more complex than the already complex structure of crystals. This stone is bananas!

I’m one of those folks that believes that the Trinity test was the first time we formally appeared on the radars of higher intelligences due to whatever the effects, seen and unseen, of a detonation of that magnitude. Something was torn open and released into this world and apart from the novelty of owning microscopic pieces of a doomsday weapon, it’s hard to find a mineral that carries it with an inherent heaviness that Sunn O))) would be envious of. It bears the vibrations of the occasion that tore a hole in reality on July 16, 1945.

So yeah. That’s going in the bottle.

Containment

Finally, the contents of the bomb are going to be extremely volatile in a spiritual sense and it’s the kind of thing that I want to keep locked up tight. So once I seal it up with wax for good it’s going into a black bag that will be kept in the triangle and out of sight of everyone else in the house when I’m not actively charging it. I tried to take a picture, but the sigils aren’t showing up well in the photos, but on one side of the bag I drew the sigil of Michael and on the other, the sigil of Raphael. On the underside of the cork is the Elder Sign. Yes. The Lovecraft thing.

From that point on, the only person who will look at it is me while I dredge up every terrifying image and entity that I drag out of the dreamlands and hold captive in the bottle.

The rituals to charge it begin on Walpurgisnacht and the release will take place on Halloween.