This article is a look at how named persona’s can become extreme forms of possession invocation, with their own history, behaviours, dress sense and characteristics, distint from that of the host.
Sometime around 1997 I took on the Discordian holy name of ‘Count Anton’. I took the idea of using an aristocratic title from the holy name of Kerry Thornley, ‘Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst’. At first I was unsure of using the title ‘Count’ as it sounded too vampiric, but all the alternatives, ‘Lord Anton’, ‘uke Anton’, ‘Sir Anton’, ‘Marquis Anton’ etc., just didn’t seem to work quite as well.
I was choosing the name whilst participating in a circle of magicians then know as NNOWW, a group that also included Val Thomas, who went on to write “A Witch’s Kitchen” after I left that group. During my time working magic with her, she wrote a short story ‘Bottled: A tale of fairy catchers’, in which Count Anton starred as a dashing and seductive villain.
Count Anton grew as a persona in me in the following years, such that when I began posting on the chaosmagic.com forums in 2000, I used ‘Count Anton’ as my username. I also began playing up on the vampire implications of the name, making posts on using vampire servitors in magical combat, that recharged themselves magically by feeding on their victims. I also put Count Anton into a magical erotic fiction written for a writing contest on the forums between myself and St. Christopholes called ‘uel in the Palace of Chaos’. This story also played up on the Count’s vampire associations, although this time he played the submissive role to the dominant Countess Ariane, an alias of Jaq D Hawkins.
To my surprise however, these stories were not necessarily the first to feature Count Anton. Indeed, by some strange twist of fate I later discovered an erotic novel featuring the character, namely ‘A feast for the senses’ by Martine Marquande. By this point my sense of dress had become increasingly gothic in style, with shirts of frill and lace and long black coats. My dark black hair grew long and wavey and I had taken to saying ‘I live for pleasure’. All these characteristics, including my catch-phrase, appeared in the character of ‘Count Anton di Maliban’ in this soft erotica novel. The character was my exact same height, with my exact same long black wavey hair and even my hazel eyes. So much were the similarities that I began to suspect that Martine Marquande was the pen name of someone that knew me. Only the publishing date of 1999 made it seem unlikely as I hadn’t widely circulated my Discordian holy name by that time.
The next time the character appeared in a story was in ‘ance of the Goblins’, the debut fantasy novel by Jaq. Maybe some of you have read it. In this book Count Anton played the role of a human magician, sympathetic to the goblins. At a certain point it is revealed that the character has a tattoo of magical symbol that combines a rose with the eight rayed star of chaos.
I mention this because I recently discovered this image:
This is the logo of Project PM, a crowd sourced investigation in to the Cyber Industrial complex, founded by Barrett Brown. Since one my fictional counterparts has this as a tattoo, and I had contributed some of my magical time and energy towards empowering EtherSec and Project Mayhem 2012, I felt a strange connection on a psychic level to this and decided to look into it a little more.
What I discovered is that Barrett Brown is another victim of the authoritarian regime’s crackdown on whistle-blowers. It turns out that Barrett has been targetted and imprisoned for a sentence of over 5 years and ordered to pay a fine of nearly $900,000 in relation to the 2011 Statfor hack. A controversial charge related to sharing a link was dropped.
Barrett is a journalist. He has written two books and many articles about politics and digital journalism. He continues to write from jail for D Magazine.
Would anyone like to join me in a distributed collaborative magical working in his aid?