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Part I: Talking Time, An interview with Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen on the rise of Fotamecus

By Psyche | January 23, 2008 | Print This Post | E-mail This Post | Comments Off

Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen is a chaos magickian best known for his encyclopedic website Chaos Matrix and the creation Fotamecus, a sigil which evolved into a godform which manipulates the experience of time.

This interview was conducted on August 16th, 2006 for issue 4 of RazorSmile, a print-based chaos magick magazine. This is the first of a three part interview.

Psyche: First of all, do you pronounce it Fota-mee-kus, or Fota-meh-kus?

Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen: Foh-Tuh-Meh-Kuss, but I’ve heard every variant you could imagine. I don’t think it matters much. For me, it was a good four-syllable mantra to hum with most 3/4 and 4/4 songs on the radio while driving.

P: Fotamecus began with a sigil, could you talk a bit about how it came about?

FKR: I wrote an essay shortly before the millennium with all the details, but the short of it was that my Discordian friend Quinn the Mad Prophet asked me one day, “What’s a sigil?”

I’d created a mantric sigil while driving somewhere the night before for the statement of intent, “Force Time Into Compression” and came up with “Fotamecus” as a four-syllable sigilic mantra. Using that I showed him how to create a graphic sigil, which was the original star-inside-box-inside-circle-with-arms Fotamecus sigil; later on we added a squiggly tail with a triangle on the end, when we turned it into a viral servitor, but I’m getting ahead of myself…

Many members of Node Fizzgig, my magickal working group at the time, started using the Fotamecus sigil. It was handy, and it worked. It was results oriented magick at its best. Each of us had a half-dozen odd stories about using it. Eventually, as the sigil became overcharged, we realized it had taken on a life of its own as a minor spirit of sorts: a servitor, for lack of a better term.

P: Was the Node inspired by the Z(Cluster), or separate from it?

FKR: Yes, it was a node of the Z(Cluster), and simultaneously a Discordian cabal.

As we kept playing with the Fotamecus sigil we started to notice patterns in its usage. Common stories included things like using it to compress a certain amount of time – say, to watch paint dry faster – and then, sometime later that day, having a stretch of time expand and seem to take forever. For time compressed, time was expanded somewhen else. For time expanded, time was compressed somewhen else. We got to playing with ideas about time and it evolved into viewing Fotamecus as a spirit of fluid time, whereas the Chronos figure represented a fixed aspect of time.

P: Was the battle consciously decided, or an effect of the entity itself?

FKR: I’m not entirely certain. There is a part of it that was the fact we were all slightly angsty college-aged freaks with a minor grudge against the system. However, the greater part seems to be a factor of setting the Fotamecus effects off from traditional conceptions of time, which were so easily represented by Chronos.

It was traditional for Node Fizzgig to meet Friday nights at my place, watch some weird movie, drive out to a weird powerpoint, do weird spontaneous magick, and then drive to a late-night diner and weird out the staff who didn’t know what to make of our conversations. We spent a lot of time at those diners pondering time aloud.

In the same stretch of time as the early Fotamecus work I did a three month sleep deprivation experiment, meditating several hours a day to keep going. That further warped my sense of time.

It was a great many combined factors like that which were ingredients in a recipe to reprogram our thoughts about time the way we wanted to. We were playing with time magick, and no one out there seemed to have written anything about it so we played on our own, just playing.

P: Why time magick? What was it about time magick that captured your interest as a group, or individually, for that matter?

FKR: Honestly, pure coincidence. It happened to be what we took up, because it was fun and was working. It got its kick-off from a random event, Quinn asking what a sigil was. But as a group and as individuals we took a strong interest in it.

For me and a few others at the least, the ideas of Time and Money were intertwined – the old saying that Time is Money – which tied together the ideas of Chronos and Mammon. Being those young angsty college kids, we resented some of the world we saw ourselves inheriting a world where we’d go trade hours for dollars. So messing with our conceptions of time was also a way of examining and playing with our conception of money.

P: This was in the early to mid 90s?

FKR: Yes, 1995 onwards. 1995-1998 was the main bulk of the Fotamecus work. At the end of that time period, we had established a huge viral network of Fotamecus sigils.

P: And he began to evolve. Could you talk more about his evolution?

FKR: Certainly. That’s the interesting part! We’d had a sigil spontaneously turn into a servitor. We’d watched and felt it happen.

We modified the Fotamecus sigil to make it a viral servitor, the idea being that the servitor can spawn copies of itself. During that modification we visualized all the individual servitors tied together.

P: Could you describe what you experienced in terms of the transition?

FKR: What did we feel? Well, when you use a sigil it doesn’t “talk back”. When we’d charged the sigil enough times it seemed to take on a personality of its own, to start to “talk back” in that sort of telepathic/empathic knowingness you get when working with and talking to spirits. Then one day it was just really clear to us that yes, there was a personality there, and each of us was consistently interacting with what appeared to be the same thing.

P: What did he say?

FKR: He said to play. He took after his parents that way, all of Node Fizzgig.

He wanted to play with time, stretch it, fold it, tweak it, and to spread. It was partially his input that went into the design for the viral network.

P: He requested it?

FKR: That was the other thing; he took on the definite aspects of a “he”.

It’s hard to say. The idea popped into one of our heads, and then it just took off like wildfire.

(Part II continues Thursday…)

Psyche is the editor of ahrfoundation.org and the curator for the occult resource SpiralNature.com, Psyche also operates a tarot consultation business, Psyche Tarot. She has been published in The Cauldron, Konton, Tarot World Magazine, among other magazines, and her essay “Strategic Magick” appeared in Manifesting Prosperity (Megalithica, 2008).

Psyche's website is http://www.ahrfoundation.org.

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