Slime Mould in Theory and Practice

Two summers ago, when my fascination with slime mould was growing exponentially, I drew people into my obsession by turning a series of presentations at conferences and festivals into collective rituals to feed a new type of spirit for a new world - something in the shape of a branching network rather than a sphere. The workings involved a hypnotic induction and poetic incantation dedicated to these networks (you can download it for yourself from my hypnosis site)

The Worshipful Society of Berlin Occultists

Getting slimy at Cae Mabon

The presentation was similar to this one at Cae Mabon but a bit messier, as I asked people to chew some oats while contemplating what magic they wanted to achieve and then squish them onto a piece of card. My plan was to inoculate those cards with slime moulds and send them back out to the punters to use as sigils or scrying screens.

Slime in Theory and Practice

The theory was good but cultivating slime moulds is as much a science as an art, and it took me the better part of a year struggling with different setups to get the conditions right. For a start, the card was from a cardboard box, which was way too thick - it absorbed too much water and either dried out or became waterlogged.

I tried cultivating slime moulds separately and moving them in when they were hungry and on the prowl, dropping them in between the oats and hoping that they would make the connections, but that didn’t work either. Most people had squished too many oats onto the cards, and with too much distance between them. Amoeba only go looking for food when they don’t have any, so if they find a mountain of oats they chow down happily while the others several generations away get left to rot.

So I switched to a series of other substrates. First I transferred a colony from card to kitchen towel.

Exodus - movement of Jah slime mould

Then me and my girls started replicating.

Making contact

As far back in prehistory as we can fathom, it seems that humans have been using their artistry to cajole the powers of the universe into resolving their problems. The Golden Dawn method involved making names of power into 2D glyphs by tracing between Hebrew letters on the Rose-Cross - a little like slide typing on a mobile phone.

I based the design of the slime magic circles on the Rose Cross, using my incantation with wonky spelling so that the whole English alphabet was included. I’m not much of a theologist, but I figured that if they were intelligent enough to prefer slime moulds to humans, a trans-species spell would impress those intelligences. And if they weren’t quite so intelligent, maybe they’d think that it was the slime moulds themselves that were casting spells. Maybe that is what is happening, in fact! Maybe the amoebas are casting the spells while I’m simply part of the apparatus - a tool holding his wand, rather than the magician? Or maybe it’s a collaboration?

Who is behind an idea that arises when collective intelligence is involved?

Anyway, either way (and any witch way), I wanted this slime to be magical as well as beautiful.

I started by placing bits of oats on the letters of people’s names, but manoeuvring disintegrating particles of wet oats is laborious so I switched to syringes of oat goo, which was slightly easier but still had a low success rate. They networked into decent shapes occasionally, but drying them out added further complications because they change shape and retreat in dry conditions. No one wants a little yellow stain when they’ve been promised a network.

I was also becoming concerned by the time it was taking. The hundreds of hours shuffling oats and slime from tub to tub wasn’t the problem - that was a gift of love to the divine matrix, mother of all of nature’s networks, whose names are myriad (and Maryoid). The problem was that I needed to complete my spell. Abracadabra means “as I speak, so I create,” and a magician who can’t deliver on things he says that are firmly within his power can’t expect to get things done via more mysterious means.

A contract is a contract, and I’m far too superstitious to break one if I can help it. The fact that there were over 100 people on several continents who were not only witnesses but parties to the contract was a bit of a worry, but the main problem was my own unconscious (by which I mean everything we’re not immediately conscious of). This is the part of us that never rests and remembers everything. It runs on simple logic and it is conservative, working to return the person it influences to balance with the world it operates in. If it concludes from its dataset that the environment is one where you say things and they happen, that becomes something like a natural law to it; it does what it can to conserve that law, and it can do a lot. If you say things and they don’t happen, the opposite law gets layed down and it will hijack the best intentions of your conscious mind in the shadows and the occult spaces it works in to preserve harmony. That’s why I avoid even telling white lies.

I’d been fiddling about for a year already so I simplified my methodology and started producing magic slime discs in bulk.

Ritual dynamics

For those who joined me in ritual, my apologies for the tardiness. If it is any consolation, the session in Berlin is 900,000,000mm from my home in Hastings, a distance a slime mould would take 103,000 years to cover. It can travel faster in its dust form on air currents and faster still on the wings of passing insects, but by synergising with me it took a mere year and a bit.

Your disc is yours with which to Do What Thou Wilt. You can scry with it for divination or keep it as a talisman or charm to wish on when you want your networks to achieve something for you. I dried it out fairly quickly, however, so I’m not sure they can all be reanimated.

For that reason, I also sent some sclerotia which have been dried more kindly. Sclerotia are living beings frozen in time, like the spirits of the brazen vessel of Solomon the king, waiting for the right conditions so they can return to roam the dense realms of reality. If you want a new housemate crawling around your temple and directing the spirits of the ether, just place them on moist tissue paper with a drop of water, and have some oats ready as they will wake up hungry. Start with just one oat, until they’re bigger (more detailed instructions here). And maybe get to know them before you drop them in a magic circle, but once you do you could then let them cover a disc and then drop some bits of oat on the letters to make yourself a slimy sigil. Or go freeform and get slimy, see what you come up with.

Initiation

Slime moulds learn and they also teach (as you can see in the video at the top). The slime moulds I cultivated are all daughters of the progenitor; they have received the same love and attention, and passed through the same initiations and tests, including secret ordeals I won’t share on a public forum. The ones you have received know a little bit about human magick already (like how clumsy it is). Perhaps they can pass on that knowledge.

As is the case with all great works, I learned a little along the way about magick. I also learned something about how to run an NGO. As a tiny org struggling with managing resources and time, it soon became clear that focusing on one area necessarily meant that we couldn’t manage something else; we learned to be careful about what we hydrated and when. I also learned to explore vigorously when the bank was empty, like a rampaging hungry slime mould. And then to first establish connections and then refine and simplify the network by formalising processes, points of contact with different parts of the organistaion. Slime moulds do this brilliantly, as you can see from the diagram.

Sustaining a network, whether it is made up of people, protists or spirits, involves creating the conditions for a connection to flourish and nutrition to be exploited, and that requires planning, persistence and time. Certain sacrifices expedite the process too, particularly in procuring consecrated items. After months of trying to make it work with Tupperware and takeaway boxes, I invested in Petri dishes as pentacles and found more success. They move at a millimetre per hour, so every time I left the house I was worried where they would be when I got back. My enterprise came closer to success when I simplified the process and sought to understand more about how slime moulds behave.

Protecting the circle

Slime moulds joined battle with pin mould, black mould and a range of other entities with agendas to grow but not to share. I had to learn how to banish with diligence and the correct unguents. The integrity of the circle must be kept intact because numberless unclean spores and spirits are floating around that will introduce their own agendas if they find a gap.

At RAIN, we had a few people blowing in from the corporate world who had a less collaborative perspective and a different agenda. I wouldn’t like to generalise, and I know plenty of successful businesspeople who are both principled and generous, but these two in particular seemed to be more interested in status and reputational risk than learning from marginalised communities. Coming from a world where hostile takeovers are simply part of the job, it was presumably natural for them to stage a coup when I wasn’t down with their plans. It was a rough winter last year, and I very nearly got kicked out of my own petri dish, but it was a learning process. Part of the purge was rejecting what was not in keeping with a collaborative and innovative enterprise and embracing what makes us stand out - our exploratory and distributed approach.

The answer was to be slimier, and as soon as we restructured - almost to the day - a lovely investor with wild hair found his way to us via my friend (his tattoo artist and a magician of no mean skill). Since then there has been more interest from people more like us.

Offering

If you would like to make an offering, please check out what the RAIN network is about and consider making a donation. If you missed the rites the first time round, me and my little yellow friends can make you more discs and sclerotia, just get in touch. If the magick is anything like as powerful for you as it is for me, your wishes will turn into dreams that turn into reality.

Relaxing back at my harem