Erisian Ritual Magic II -- The Paper Clip Sacrifice
Erisian Ritual Magic II -- The Paper Clip
Sacrifice
Sometimes, you just feel the need to introduce a gout of confusion into
an aneristic situation (say, just about any office on a grey Tuesday
afternoon, around 2PM). One good way to do this is the Paper Clip
Sacrifice.
You will need (those marked with a `*' are optional):
-
Five paper clips, preferably
virgin (which, for unknown reasons, seems to
make all ritual sacrifices more effective; maybe the universe doesn't
have any use for self-righteous prudes, either).
- One uptight coworker, the more straight-laced the better.
- * Five bendy-straws
- * One Golden Delicious apple
- * One copy of the Principia Discordia
If you've decided to go with the more complex ritual, first construct a
ritual pentagon out of the bendy-straws, as follows:
- Connect the straws together into one long straw by crimping the long end
(that is, the end which is longer in terms of where the accordioning is) of
one straw and inserting it into the short end of the next, and so on. It
is vitally unimportant that you crimp the long end of the straw.
- Now, bend all the bendy bits of the straws so that you can crimp the
last remaining long end and insert it into the initial small end.
- Fiddle with the finished product until it looks sufficiently like a
pentagon.
- Hang the finished product over a thumbtack on your corkboard; you never
know when you might need a bendy-straw. Also, coworkers will be confused
about why you have it there, but probably never confused enough to actually
ask you about it. This produces something of an eristic space for this and
all future workings.
The Ritual:
- Unbend the five paper clips and place them, without a word of
explanation, on the desk of the uptight coworker. Walk away.
- If you have a Golden Delicious apple handy, eat it -- people tend not
to get enough fiber in their diets. And, once you have a high-fiber diet,
the Principia makes good bathroom reading.
The ritual has, symbolically and in actuality, transformed the relatively
small amount of bureaucratic order in the paper clips (the symbol of
red-tape paperwork everywhere) into a much larger amount of confusion,
thereby shifting (at least temporarily) the balance
in your office. Constructing the ritual pentagon, clearly, has a similar
effect but converts the utilitarian order of the bendy-straws into a more
persistent and low-grade field of confusion, while also drawing on the power
of the pentagon in its transmutative capacity as part of the
Hodge-Podge
Transformer.
It is important to bear in mind that the goal of this
ritual is creative -- it's meant to use some chaos to blunt the uncomfortable
and therefore
destructive restrictures of office boredom and to introduce into the
uptight coworker's day a bit of adaptive confusion (or at least some
much-needed variety in their uptightness). If you're doing this with the
intent of harming
your coworker's probably-fragile psyche for a few cheap laughs, you should
really consider getting your
Three
of Stooges in an upright position before fiddling with potentially
harmful occult forces.
For information on a classic Erisian warding ritual, please consult
the
Turkey Curse. If you're of the Neopagan persuasion (or are willing to
be so persuaded), check out the invocations/banishings on the
Wiccan
Waccos page. Some general information on Discordian magic can be found
in the document on
occultism.