Techno-Shamanism, the Mangkukulam and Chaos Magick
In the comicbook Baylans: Hack the Culture, the lead character, Jonas Arcanghel, is a dabbler of techno-shamanism, modern witchcraft practices combined with technological metaphors. Techno-shamanism is a relatively new field in modern witchcraft. While religious fundamentalists will cringe at the thought of witchcraft, evoking images of old hags flying through the sky in brooms, or black-robed bearded bald men wielding sacrificial knives, modern witches are not daemonic worshippers. They are practicioners of psychical exercises, attempting to affect the reality within the own reach of their minds. Techno-shamanism narrows this practice further to involve only objects of technology, the result of man's endless lust to reshape nature, as psychical focus. This will usually involve technological objects as metaphors: hardware, like electronic or mechanical tools, engines, television, computers, and software, like single-user programs or networked applications, and multimedia. The goal of techno-shamanism is to use these technological objects to control the powerful subconscious mind and affect change within the self or the magician's immediate environment .
Magick by Santu-Santo
Techno-shamanism in Baylans: Hack the Culture extends this concept to include the adoption of local witchcraft practices, a fusion of magickal methods. A book written by Nid Anima, Witchcraft Filipino Style, describes the various magickal practices all over the Philippines. In its chapter on Black Art in Ilocandia, Anima enumerates the variations of sorcerers in Bicol. The most feared is the mannumba, who has the power to deliver death magick.
Anima describes the method by which this sorcerer performed a death spell. After dancing and incantations, a white chicken is sacrificed. At the area where the corpse of the chicken lay, a housefly that wandered near the corpse was captured and placed in a sealed empty bottle. The victim whom this spell was intended died by suffocation that same night.
In Filipino magickal practices, the will of the sorcerer is carried out by means of spiritual vehicles who do the sorcerer's bidding. This method is similar to the practice of Santeria magick in Haiti, where spirits called Orishas are being commanded by the magician. Santeria survived in modern Cuba, Brazil, Hairi, Trinidad and Puerto Rico by disguising their orisha worship with devotion to Catholic saints. In Baylans, the same magickal method is used, combining folk catholicism and pagan magickal ways, in a fictional witchcraft style called Santu-Santo. In Santu-Santo, Diwata spirits do the sorcerer's bidding. A discussion on Diwatas is available in another article in Weirdsville Philippines.
Do-it-Yourself Magick
The fusion of different magickal practices is already accepted in some occult circles, including the New Age movement. What is important, according to some magickal theorists, is that the method is perceived to be consistent and understood by the subconscious. A good example of magickal spells that fuse Western methods with Filipino ways is Tony Perez' Mga Panibagong Kulam. This book contains spells devised by the author to impact various aspects of personal life, ranging from friendship, career and self-improvement.
Witchcraft Filipino Style, Nid Anima
Mga Panibagong Kulam, Tony Perez
What Is Santeria?, http://www.seanet.com/Users/efunmoyiwa/santeria.html