Occulture
Page 4
With the Nazi Machtübernahme (takeover), human sexuality was again restrained after a period of considerable freedom. The Third Reich brought functionalism and purpose back to sex. Women became lauded breeding machines for racially superior children (future soldiers, no doubt). The cult of the athletic body was maintained to quite a great extent but always demagogically so. Free love was now literally a thing of the past. Although Monte Verita had already passed its peak by 1933, the people still residing there must surely have felt lucky that Ascona was in Switzerland and not in Germany. The Swiss Anthroposophists must have felt the same way. In Germany proper, Anthroposophy was duly banned after the Nazi takeover.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, there were basically two radical movements in the Germanic sphere: one mental/ intellectual and one intuitive/corporeal. Psychoanalysis, modernism, Dada, and a conscious, political discourse are examples of the first strain; Lebensreform is the prime example of the second strain. Seemingly, the strains were kept apart. Perhaps they were regarded by everyone involved as incongruous? Had someone been able to merge the two, truly radical things could have happened. The greatest success story of the time, and also the person whose philosophy carried the greatest potential for merging the two, Rudolf Steiner, was in every way spiritual-corporeal rather than intellectual-corporeal.
In many ways one could argue that the National Socialists did indeed manage to combine the two strains successfully: intellectual and corporeal. The problem was that their concept as such came at a very high price: restricted individual liberty, the Second World War, and mass human sacrifice. And, let’s not forget it, a totally devastated and fire-soaked Vaterland.
The later concept of the “Black Sun” and its esoteric mysteries within a post-Nazi mythos is highly interesting in this regard. It’s an almost perfect symbol of the dark side of a culture and history so utterly steeped in different facets of solar worship. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s Black Sun is a fascinating introduction to this vast area of research:
As in the case of the Ariosophists in the early twentieth century, political isolation in a hostile world committed to liberalism has led many neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups to embrace occult notions of ancient Aryan wisdom. From the 1970s onward, right-wing extremists began to repackage the old ideology of Aryan racism, elitism and force in new cultic guises involving esotericism and Eastern religions. In Austria and Germany, the former SS man Wilhelm Landig revived the ariosophical mythology of Thule, the supposed polar homeland of the ancient Aryans. He coined the idea of the Black Sun, a substitute swastika and mystical source of energy capable of regenerating the Aryan race.6
At the bottom of the main dilemma lies perhaps not only the sun as a symbol of fiery and pagan motherly energies but also the more human aspect of life force in Eros. Central to the Lebensreform ideas was a breach with monogamic behavior patterns. If everyone was in the nude and healthy, not only was there a “democratization” of sorts but also an underlying (or overt) sexual energy present. This, of course, created tangible challenges in environments like Monte Verita, as among smaller communities of “amateur” naturists and nudists. It’s not surprising that family was militantly stressed by both sides during the Weimar Republic that followed after the First World War. The socialists wanted to create family units of a healthy working class and the National Socialists wanted the same, with racial motives on top.
The eroticism of the Lebensrefom movement was always deeply rooted in nature and in rurally based fantasies about individual attraction and begetting new, sun-drenched life. In many ways, they were perhaps correct in their anti-urban assumptions. The urban sexuality of early twentieth-century Germany seemed either debauched and neurotic, as in the almost clichéd depictions of Weimar decadence in Berlin, or carefully constructed and controlled via the Nazis’ eugenic visions of purity.
Lebensreform’s moral breach with the oppressive Christian cult(ure), and their focus on the human body in nature (naked or not), vitalizing food, abstinence from alcohol and tobacco, as well as a romantic yearning for pagan days, basically sexualized an entire generation. As many of these overall themes already existed in German culture, it was the sexual freedom that became the most radical aspect of this cocktail. Regardless if it was made manifest in modernist art, intellectual theories, pre-hippie-esque “free love,” or as specialized magico-sexual techniques within the OTO and similar fraternities, the extreme individualization of sex was the singular greatest threat to any homogenized “Germanicism.” The free-flowing energy of love was therefore the first victim as Eros drifted into Thanatos in not only National Socialist theory and practice but also in its rich and powerful iconography. The young soldiers-to-be of the Hitlerjugend, and the blond-braided beauties of the Mädel-bünde (maidens league) were of course not encouraged to explore each other to reach cosmic insights and unions of love, but simply to become obedient breeders of racially pure Aryans.
In August of 1903, an article on the goings-on in Ascona was published in a San Francisco newspaper, followed by many more. Some key people in the German movement emigrated to America at about the same time. Perhaps the most important character was William “Bill” Pester (1886–1963), born in Saxony but from 1906 and onward settled in California, where he lived as a “nature boy” (immortalized by fellow naturalist eden ahbez in his song of the same name, “Nature Boy,” which was turned into a smash hit by Nat “King” Cole).
The wisdom of the German and German-influenced nature boys, through newspaper articles and radio broadcasts, influenced an American generation that was to bloom fully during the 1960s: the hippies. Hermann Hesse’s novels Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, steeped in concepts that he had integrated while visiting Monte Verita, became huge influences on this budding generation of American freethinkers. It would probably be a simplification to say that the earlier beatniks could fit the mold too. The beats were far too self-indulgent in their own explorations of altered states of consciousness and life as a journey, come what may. It was the hippies who not only wanted to return to nature in peace, but also actively integrated many of the Lebensreform ingredients: free love, vegetarianism, nudism to varying degrees, and so forth. It’s no wonder that this imported kind of pagan solar worship caught on in sunny California.
This movement created a foundation for what we can see around us today in the Western sphere: ecological awareness, organic and biodynamic farming, holistic perspectives within a dynamic and openminded spirituality, and an integrated liberal sexuality. Although totalitarian systems around the world tried to appropriate the key elements from the Lebensreform movement, it seems the elements still work best underneath the umbrella of individual liberty and under the naked benediction of the sun.
3
Abstraction Made Concrete
The Occultural Methods and Mutations of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth
Originally a lecture delivered at Nekropolis Bogcafé in Copenhagen, Denmark, 2013.
I AM HERE TODAY to talk about an interesting phenomenon that existed for approximately ten years, between 1982 and 1992. This phenomenon was like a mix between a magical order, a think tank, an archive, an experiment in intentional art, and many other things. I’m talking about Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY for short, which spread out of the UK and into the world and soon reached thousands of members and/or subscribers to TOPY’s frequent newsletters and information.
My own involvement in this began around 1984, when I started out as a humble subscriber to newsletters and bought records, pamphlets, fanzines, and so forth, from TOPY’s own mail-order service in the United Kingdom. I was very interested in all things occult at the time, and I immediately realized that TOPY was something brand-new. Everything I had read about magic and occultism always dealt with something old, arcane, systematically symbolic, and quite dusty. But not so with TOPY. I was enthused and got involved. I started working with the UK people and set up a Scandinavian branch or “access point,” aptly called TOPYSCA
N. This later developed into TOPYEUROPE, which for me meant basically a lot of administration run out of my little apartment in Stockholm.
It was an incredibly creative time, I have to say. TOPYSCAN, TOPYEUROPE, and an affiliated company I started called Psychick Release put out books, cassettes, CDs, vinyl records, and videocassettes and arranged workshops, lectures, film and video screenings, concerts as well as more esoteric things like group rituals and magical workshops for those really active within this highly pragmatic sphere.
Some time in 1991 I burned out and decided to not carry on, as the adminsitration had simply become so overwhelming. Interestingly enough, the key people in the United Kingdom and the United States had felt exactly the same thing at about the same time. We basically decided it was time to end TOPY as we knew it. A first phase of ten hyper-interesting years had gone by.
So where do we begin when looking at this phenomenon? If we look to the United Kingdom, we can recognize some well-known people. Artist Genesis P-Orridge and his collaborators at the time (like Peter Christopherson from the former project Throbbing Gristle, and David Tibet, an Aleister Crowley romantic who also formed the band Current 93) decided to try to create a group synthesizing their own inspirations in art and magic and at the same time commenting upon or influencing the harsh political climate of the United Kingdom.
With magical mentors like Aleister Crowley, Austin Osman Spare, tribal shamanism, and the literary and artistic cut-up applications of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and artistic seeds like the surrealists, Dada, mail art, situationism, sixties counterculture, and many, many other things, a core developed that would grow to form Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth as a communal and quaquaversal entity rather than a hierarchic traditional order with followers.
At center stage of this new hybrid was a video group that also made music, called Psychic Television, or PTV. This was formed by P-Orridge, Christopherson, and musician Alex Fergusson, and David Tibet was in there too at an early stage. Taking advantage of the unlikely successes and infamy of the predecessor Throbbing Gristle, the group secured record deals with major labels like Warner and CBS, which at the time was almost beyond fluke level. But it happened. PTV started recording music and making videos that soon became a very integrated part of TOPY and its philosophy.
There was a great deal of writing going on too, with the most well-known text being Thee Grey Book. What was it all about? What was the actual philosophy of TOPY? Well, it’s clear to see that there was a great deal in it of Crowleyan Thelema—that is, of Crowley’s philosophy of will and considerate subjectivism. But there was an amplification of this more general attitude of “Do what thou wilt” in the technical sorcery system of British painter and magician Austin Osman Spare and the cut-up methodology of writer William Burroughs and painter Brion Gysin—all latter-day TOPY saints of course. The core was one of sacralized free will, and an experimental technology was presented to root out bad habits, whether imposed by others or simply one’s own, and generate change through, quite often, artistic means.
PTV was very productive, and also worked with other filmmakers like Derek Jarman, John Maybury, and Cerith Wyn Evans, to create a cinematic or televisual corpus of ritual footage, poetic propaganda, and psychedelic playfulness. The musical side of things took the entourage on the road to many, many concerts all over the world. An example of this first phase could be my own first experience of PTV live, which was in Stockholm in 1984. There was one video screening of their material at Konstfack, a college of art, on the first night and then a regular concert (which also included the videos) at a rock club on the following night. There was a presence in both worlds, so to speak.
TOPY was not a hierarchical group or order. This was interesting, as most of esoteric history comes out of very hierarchic fraternities. It’s more correct to say that TOPY was a meritocracy structured atomically. The proton would be a “station” or an “access point”—that is, local points in time and space—and around these members and interested people constituted electrons and simply revolved.
One key magical technique that mixed transformative potential with artistic expression was the process called sigilization. Formulated well by Austin Spare in his books, it basically meant stripping the conscious formulation of your desired goal into smaller particles or denominators that could then be creatively readjusted into new and highly un- or subconscious forms during some form of ecstatic mind frame—most often of a sexual kind. This should be done in an as aestheticized way as possible, for instance on a sheet of paper, and also include sexual liquids, blood, and hair. This would then constitute one’s own very private and vividly symbolic manifestation of will.
According to TOPY’s integration of William Burroughs’s mind-boggling romanticism concerning the number 23, this sigilizing ritual should be performed on the 23rd of each month at 2300 hours. If you began that process, you were given a Temple name: “Eden” and a number for men, and “Kali” and a number for women. If you completed 23 such sigils, you became elevated, not necessarily in rank but certainly in respect. But it was also totally possible to keep this process a secret if you so desired.
These special sigils were sent in to the TOPY stations (United Kingdom, United States, and eventually Europe), where they were filed in confidence. I don’t think there has ever existed such a unique collection of heterogeneous yet philosophically resonant magical art.
This technique was the central one for active TOPY members. But there were also other rituals that were performed together, quite often for communal goals and projects, but sometimes also for greater altruistic purposes; these were very often sexual in nature and method but not all the time. In the UK and United States, workshops were held with a Native American Indian shaman called Nomad, and in Scandinavia we did similar things with the Norwegian shaman Arthur Sørensen and also with the percussionist and wizard-artist z’ev. This was focused on a more classical form of shamanism, with mind travels to the different spheres or “worlds” and communications with what- or whoever was found there.
Another overall method was filtering or stripping thoughts and sentiments from the past, so they could fit our contemporary times. Promoting forgotten geniuses like Spare, beat iconoclasts like Burroughs or poet Harry Crosby, to mention but a few, catapulted these spirits into the psyches of a generation brought up on despair and desolation. These pioneers had shown that it was possible, like Crowley had prophesied, to “do what thou wilt,” but certain psychic barriers had to be torn down or deconstructed first. TOPY helped administer some of these tearing-down techniques.
There were other magical groups of like mind around at the time. The Illuminates of Thanatheros (IOT) generated a vortex of what they called chaos magic, with a similar hardcore and pragmatic approach, often ingrained with scientific terms of the day, such as from quantum physics. The Order of the Nine Angles (ONA) was a more sinister and dark group or, rather, collective, of individuals exploring Satanic motives and motivations. It is interesting to see that stagnant fraternal, traditional orders dealing with some kind of esoteric teaching or practical magic, and a political climate that was based in a fiercely conservative approach to handling things (à la Margaret Thatcher’s government) actually became fertile soil for truly thinking out of the box. TOPY was never interested in politics per se, but actively promoted individual liberty on all levels and also fought for some pragmatic goals such as then-current wildlife or animal rights issues.
As this entire environment was deeply rooted in a postpunk or do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, the emphasis on a “cottage industry” psychology turned into great signal and very little noise. Almost every TOPY station or access point had its own setup for producing printed matter, records, videos, and so on, all talismanic and carrying a magical charge in their own peculiar way. Even if only for internal distribution, the output was big and local distribution warmly taken care of by devoted members.
Hence the concept of occulture saw the light of day, as hundreds o
f TOPY members digested and divested arcane lore in new and pop-scientific ways to a DIY generation frustrated with lies, blunt propaganda, and mass-market ersatz commodities. From the glamorous spheres of occultism and counterculture, there now emerged occulture, containing sharp philosophies, magical technologies, kudos to those who had worked before us—whether in art or magic—and a general sense of enthusiasm in reveling in the great mystery of life and existence. TOPY made out-of-print books available in photocopies to members, and forgotten musics were widely disseminated via cassette tapes. Ditto for forgotten yet inspiring films on VHS cassettes and pirate broadcasts. A lot of previously impossible-to-find things were suddenly made available.
This essential theme of availability became bedrock, an essential foundation. Pragmatically appropriating and recontextualizing hidden morsels of subversive seed (and flowers) soon became a practical method, in which previous levels of abstraction—not seldom placed there because of the need for self-preservation—became very concrete indeed. It was almost as if the process evolved smoother and faster exponentially—meaning, the more, the merrier.
That’s one level of concretization: demystifying old codes, and spelling them out in an attitude of inquisitive analysis—“Can we use this for something?” This was true within TOPY not only in breaking symbolic codes in traditional occultism and hermeticism but also in pop-cultural appropriations. An example: Burroughs and Gysin were demigods in the TOPY mythology. Lots of literature was available, but there was more to it. Genesis managed to borrow 16 mm prints of the legendary Antony Balch films with Burroughs and Gysin from the 1960s. I then traveled with these prints and showed them in Berlin and other places at independent cinemas, thereby not only reverently resonating with our icons, but also spreading them in a wider, cultural context. I also traveled with a film program called “Visions of Occulture” in 1989, which had Benjamin Christensen’s beautiful film Häxan (the Witchcraft through the Ages version, narrated by William Burroughs) and some Jodorowsky films. The same was true here: intra-order mythology and pop-cultural expressions in a wider context—and at the same time.