Duncan Trussell Explains Ritual Magick to Joe Rogan

When you say he studies magic, what do you mean by that? So, well he wrote a great book called High Magic, which is, I think that's what it's called. It's a fantastic book on... magic is really the wrong word for it. There's an entire mythos or religion that got sort of wiped out by... Terrence McKenna talks about it a lot. It got kind of wiped out by superstition. So, witchcraft, as we understand it now, because of Hollywood, is like ladies riding around on brooms and shit. But it just used to be midwifery. It used to be healing women who would deliver babies and stuff. But these were all connected to... they all had pagan roots. And so, essentially you can follow back this branch of data that some people say started in Sumeria or Egypt. Ways of meditating, ways of connecting with the universe that are ritualistic in nature, but seem mysterious to us. Because even though if you want to see what it looks like, just look at a Catholic mass. You're looking at a ceremony. It's theurgy, I guess you'd call it. That is a magical ceremony where bread gets converted into the flesh of a God that you eat. So, that's... you're watching... they're all wearing robes. They're burning incense. So, that is magic. That's what ceremonial magic looks like. It's non-different from ceremonial magic. Someone in the Catholic Church might tell you, this isn't magic. This is me praying to the infinite and asking for forgiveness. That's magic! You're connecting with a divine intelligence. You're hoping from your connection with a divine intelligence to produce some change in your own psychology, in your own life. And maybe create good fortune or whatever it is you're praying for, healing, whatever it may be. That's magic. So, magic is that. And that... it's... I'm not saying the Catholic Catholicism wouldn't necessarily be considered a branch of magic. One of the things he said in this interview is like, if the Bible is one of the most powerful magical grimoires there is. I mean, you read that shit. If you really look in it, there's all kinds of bizarre stuff that doesn't seem to make it onto Christian radio. Like what? Well, like when in the book of Genesis, it's... why are they saying... why do they refer to themselves as a plurality? When God's talking, it's not like... when they're saying like, why do we throw Adam and Eve out of the garden? It's we. If we don't do something about this, they will become like us. We. There's a plurality that's being mentioned there. And so what is that plurality? So, throughout the Bible, there's mentions of angels. The book of Ezekiel, the famous one that Ufologists go to. There's all these contacts with angels, hyperdimensional beings that have some data set they want to bring to the world. Quite often, depending on what book you're in, it's some terrifying prophecy about the end of the world that's coming. But sometimes it's, you know, some message of hope or some message of healing. So you could say magic is a non-Christian oriented method for connecting with those various entities using ritual. That's one branch of it. Now, I'm not saying, by the way, these beings exist or don't exist. But you could say, if you wanted to get like, psychologically, you could say we have buried inside of us archetypes, bits of the collective that are buried deep inside of us. And that there are ways to connect to these little fragments of the collective mind. And, you know, many people know, have their own method for doing that. One of the methods to do that might be doing a ritual. And for a moment, allowing yourself to imagine that you're trying to talk to an extra dimensional being. Alistair Crowley famously did one of these rituals and contacted a God, what was it? I can't remember what the being was called, but it looks like a gray alien. This is before people were talking about gray aliens. You looked at it. Did he draw it? He drew it. There's a drawing of it. Yeah. And it looks like a gray alien. And what year was this? It's like the 1800s. Alistair Crowley was in the 1800s. Yeah, right. 1989, 1900s. You keep pulling at your ghillie suit. You remind me of a drunk overweight girl with large breasts that keeps adjusting her halter top. Like you're in Florida outside drinking at some motel. We're having a great night. I told that motherfucker, I'm going to leave you. I'm going to leave you Clarence. I'm tired of y'all bullshit. I told him with a cigarette in her hand. Wow. Look at that drawing by Alistair Crowley. Yeah. That does look like a gray alien. Yeah, man. And he- That's what we're going to look like, man. Let's cut the shit. That's what we're going to look like. When you see people that are hairy and brutish, we think of them as being closer to prehistoric man. You see a guy covered in hair. He looks more like a beast. When we see people that are thinner and more slender, they become more a gentle version of people. We associate that oftentimes with intelligence. We directly associate intelligence with frailty. Right? We all do that. When you see some super genius guy, usually they're frail. Occasionally they're badasses, but there's a lot of those super genius guys who couldn't fight their way out of a wet paper bag. Well, Hawking's the ultimate example because his body literally failed him while he was coming up with his greatest discoveries. So this is our future. We're going to have big heads. We're going to fucking crisper your way into a head that lets you live in any dimension you want at any time. You transport yourself from one planet to the other. Imagine what we've done with our stupid monkey brains. Now imagine it was 150% larger, 150% more brain, and then incorporated all sorts of fucking electronics that lets you interface with space time around you and all kinds of other wacky ways of communicating. We couldn't even possibly imagine now, just like people from the 1800s couldn't have ever possibly imagined cell phones. Right. And this is the idea is like, okay, we're going to go there. And then when we get there, the way we understand space time is going to be different than the way we understand it now. So what that means is theoretically you could connect or communicate with a being that is outside of space time, which is a future version of us right now, using various methods, DMT being one of the big ones on the planet right now, but also using other methods that are a little bit more precise. Because with DMT, it's kind of like you're not really putting in GPS coordinates necessarily. Some people do it with intention, like a shaman will do it with intention and can like, excuse me, can you give me another Bloody Mary? I told you Clarence. I'll fucking leave you cigarette in your hand flip flops on. I will fucking leave you. Clarence, if you keep some of these demons, I am out of here. Clarence is over there with Miller like you ain't going nowhere. Just stop. Just fucking stop. You always do this. She gets drunk. She says she's leaving. I'm a fucking lady. Clarence, I'm gonna fucking leave you son of a bitch. I'm putting on my ghillie suit and going down to Tampa. You son of a bitch. I'm gonna visit my family in clear water. I'm out of here, Clarence. It's over. Anyway, yeah, maybe you can connect through time and space to these things that are already here. Like our understanding of time and space, we're locked in, man. But like, so magic is like ridiculous on one level as it absolutely sounds and is on one level. On another level is at the very least a creative technique so that you can sort of summon a dream state while you're awake with the intent of causing some change in the world around you using, for a lot of people, what would be considered a non-standard way. Well, just in terms of your perception of how you view the world, you can alter that pretty radically. I mean, from someone who has an amazingly positive perception versus someone who has an amazingly negative perception, you look at the results. Overwhelming benefit of being a positive person. Overwhelming. There's something to thoughts and ideas that propel you in a good way. And for having a good architecture, for having a good philosophy, having a good operating manual for how you view the world and how you act and behave. Part of that's you getting up at four o'clock in the morning. That's what that is. You're like enforcing your ability to sort of dictate the positive aspects of your future. You're deciding to take action. You're strengthening your bond with the way you interface with current reality. And I was doing it, I mean, not rigidly. Why not stop? What the fuck? Oh, Christmas. God damn it. Listen, man, if you want to meet me here, I'll meet you here. We could do some 5 a.m sessions. I'd love that, man. I mean, yeah, I would love that. Let's do it. I'm 100% down. Yeah. Come down here. We'll get pump. We'll put Slayer on and fucking rock out.