A legendary figure of Chaos Magick

Once the initial work of concocting the ciphers was complete, the GoN soon found its way onto the Z(cluster) e-mail list as part of Infek's ongoing guerilla ontology ops. Many of those interactive ops often made their way onto his site, www.deathandhell.com. He has an entire library of "threats" he'd accumulated from posts on various lists and message boards; this was quite a long while before the advent of modern social media forums.

These new platforms have attracted hordes of aesthetic witches, cyber divas, and meme magickers who try their best to impersonate actual practitioners, but promptly fail.

Infek had begun initiating flamewar campaigns against the regulars and noobs on the list. Suppose they said something idiotic, like talking about Wicca's threefold law or saying that magickians shouldn't use hallucinogens in their praxis. In those cases, he'd probably reply with a cryptic meme-bomb to scramble the thread.

We're not talking about the memes of today that are just silly pictures inscribed with a joke. We're talking about viral Dawkinsian memetics, which are more like pathological algorithmic datasets that synthesize their effects by opportunistically adulterating the human nervous system and modifying the host organism's conduct or functioning, causing them to propagate whatever pattern the originating memetic engineer had designed as their victim's auto-self-destruct sequence.

In the right hands, memes can be exactly as ingratiating and catastrophic as the vilest, most insidious curse sent by a veteran technician of hexcraft.

Then again, if you did something really fucking stupid like mismanage his forums or hack into his server, he would emblazon a moniker on you that would mar your reputation and then memorialize the process on his site with a display of original art and some text.

It wasn't necessarily your real face on display, but it was a sort of vision board of your debasement, complete with an egregious nickname he had given you. People took those artistically honed insults pretty seriously, no matter what they may claim in his absence.

Infek was exceptionally adept at getting under people's skin, especially because he had likely shown his victims courtesy at some point prior. The fact is, Z(enseider)Z obtained plans that prove we all would've succumbed to the wrath of his keyboard conjurings.

His memetics seemed revolutionary and even though he could only use plain text on the e-mail lists and message boards, he was far from stifled by those ordinary fonts and crude venues. His posts were filled with threatening language, excerpts, lyrics, quotes, GoN enumerations, play on words, URLs, magickal acronyms (notarikon), and even some flash fiction.

However, adding the dimension of his site made things all the more dramatic. His words came alive on the dark ambience of D&H's high-contrast black pages, whereas most of the Internet at the time was all courier typeface on a plain white background.

We ate it up because we were young, impressionable, and prone to believing the possibility of anything. His site was truly a mystery into which one must be initiated and there are still things he wrote about that no one can decipher.

When you're first starting in the occult, knowledge is like a drug mainlined to your brain. It festers and metastasizes and creates paranoid fantasies about conspiracy intrigue, government cover-ups, demonic mediumship, cosmic agendas, and the mystical dueling of light and dark forces amid the multidimensional macrocosmic infinitude of this ever-surrounding, ever-binding, ever-permeating spatiotemporal vacuutinuum. As they say, give a monkey a brain, and he'll think he's the center of the universe.

Avenues of predation undreamed of

Infek was the lone wolf that made no qualms about who he fed from. He was what Z(enseider)Z now deems "energetically omnivorous" in his aim to feed off people's shock and humiliation, or even their delete key and eye-roll. It's still a reaction. We often don't see how those little moments make us react; be it shock or boredom, they are still forms of petite gnosis that slowly phenomenize our enslavement to his reality.

Our theory is that he was such an inestimably proficient black magickian that he was ready to move on. He had fulfilled his True Will to embody the Archetypal Theriomorph. Thus, he reached a state of Moksha that allowed him to elude Samsara and gain admittance to Nirvana. He shed his body, exalted his name as Infek Ren Sekhem Khu, and became an everlasting godform in the digital chrysalis of his Online Sarcophagi.

Those of us who would become Node Z(enseider)Z found his brand of tragicomedy utterly mind-bending. It was funny on some juvenile level sure, but that was only a minute portion of his schtick. The subject matter he drew from were borne of the great music, great artists, great authors, and great esoterics he'd been exposed to throughout his life.

He was a deranged yet competent ringmaster for the circuses of varying Chaos currents cropping up in the new-fangled world of the occult in the '90s.

It was a pretty happening end for Chaos Magick as a living current because the version we see on display these days doesn't have a lick of authenticity. Magick today doesn't seek to transgress anything. If you're not transgressing anything how do you evolve?

Chaos Magick has gone the way of the Ouija board: it's now sold by Milton & Bradley.

Influences that leave a lasting imprint

Infek's ideas came from all kinds of angles. We once asked if the Gematria of Nothing was a parody of Arthur M. Young's "Geometry of Meaning" (which is a sort of natal chart with 12 zodiac signs where every zodiac corresponds to a concept in Physics like control, force, energy, velocity, power, inertia, momentum, etc. and they represent the experiential avenue of metamorphosis from one phase of being to another) he didn't so much as confirm it as he seemed kind of surprised that we'd heard of it.

Thelema, in all its incarnations, meant a lot to Infek. He genuinely adored Crowley, but to be more specific, he paired unsurprisingly well with the Typhonian niche. His reverence for Kenneth Grant was exceptionally obvious, but his material ran much deeper than that.

Vama Marga played into the philosophical sub-strata of his narratives. Plus, it didn't hurt having a long-practicing Mahayana Buddhist, enraptured by both Dzog Chen and Death & Hell, as one of his admirers. Mark Defrates (aka Marik) made the perfect concierge to expound on Infek's unnerving approach to bleeding-edge black magick. Marik sometimes went on lengthy dissertations comparing the so-called Left-Hand Path of Tantra to Infek's concept for the Hot-Vessel Cadaver, a modern sacrificial substitute adorned with a ceremonial Shakti collar.

Marik also examined how Death & Hell was fashioned in the Burroughs/Gysin-esque cut-up vogue toward revealing the unconscious mind. You might say Death & Hell is a Dream Machine in its own right. A site that also offers early Genesis P-Orridge-style experimental happenstance with randomness as its modality while displaying kinetic verbiage as weaponized enlightenment from a Gurdjieffian atavism. Infek's model of magick remained timely and sharp until his death in 2001.

Subverting the dominant paradigm

Why were his tactics so effective against the psyber-citizenry? Most of us were docile geeks who'd spent our formative years behind a computer or console. He was this badass chaos magickian who strode with more big dick energy than your average magus can ever hope to muster.

He was That Dude, to say the least, for several reasons:

• he studied Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Wing Chun, and a few other martial arts for some years
• he traveled extensively throughout the country and abroad, which imparted a certain weathered sense of wisdom that speaks for itself
• he was part of the BDSM/Kink scene in Seattle because he's always been a pervert at heart
• he was quite the lady's man from all accounts
• he could sing like Jim Morrison
• he knew fuckloads about philosophy and the occult, and it was all too evident in his e-mail posts and in the original material on his website
• he wrote a book called "The Wormholes of Chronos" the PDF of which he gave away for free on his site, something which might be common today, but was a rare treat in the mid-to-late 90s
• he extrapolated from R. A. Wilson's story "The Sex Magickians" with his concept for the Working Sex Magickian which complimented his HVC idolum as though one was the operator and one was the apparatus. Although, you never knew quite which was which the way he told it. Were the WSMs the domineering breed we were meant to assume, or were the HVCs topping from the bottom, as esoteric metaphors might suggest?

However, the WSM wasn't just a concept in his able arms. He lived it. He was the apotheosis of a psychedelic anarchist commandant who participated in the WTO protests in Seattle in '99. He despised the two-term administration of H.(v.c.)W. Bush, Sr. He was disgusted at how fast operations in Iraq turned from Desert Shield (ensuring Kuwait's sovereignty) to Desert Storm (upending a despot that, like it or not, had kept Iraq more or less 'stable' the way no one else could). He found G. W. Bush, Jr. more abhorrent in his first year in the White House than his father's entire tenure a decade earlier.

Infek lived long enough to witness 9/11, engage in conspiracy theorizing with us about how it was an inside job, and then a couple of months later; he was "gone, baby, gone," to quote the Violent Femmes.

We are taking brief snapshots of a life lived to untold extremes of bliss and agony. We are barely even scratching the surface of what his existence entailed. If he were alive today at the time of writing, he'd be 70-something years old. How time flies when you're forever high, yet lucky enough to still be alive in these interesting times.

See you all next Charliemass feast, my siblings!

          Mad P'z & OV,

Sib. Khytra-ajz'L Vuulghis 582

Nothing has Being  

  Everything has Value