Psychick Release also republished some out-of-print books about runes in Swedish by older scholars. This was relevant to our own availability in terms of the material. Rare book and manuscripts appeared, new contacts were made, and many opportunities arose. This generated a field of dynamic creativity, in which many, many synchronicities appeared and greased the machine further.
When the first TOPY phase ended something else immediately began. The Internet began, and with this a paradigm shift unparalleled in the history of human civilization. Immediately there emerged a fiction-based subculture called cyberpunk in which strains of the TOPY inspirations Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick were established even more prominently than during the 1980s, when it was mainly singular key people like P-Orridge and Joy Division singer Ian Curtis who brought attention to important instigators like this.
A new cyberpunk culture emerged that both feared and loved the Internet. Magazines like the American Mondo 2000 questioned, codified, defined, and redefined culture in Internet times. One prime mover in the shadows was, again, Genesis P-Orridge, who had been exiled to California after the demise of TOPY in 1991–92. As a result of those early cyber movements came the successful Matrix films, after which followed a massive infusion of general hocus-pocus in film and in literature: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Twilight, and so on. Bland mass-market expressions, yes, but still probably very indicative of a world in need of some serious re-enchantment. Especially if we consider the enormous successes of all these films and franchises.
Schematically, the Internet is basically carrying on in a TOPY tradition, whether conscious of it or not: making things available, empowering an exchange of ideas and thoughts, promoting human development, encouraging pioneering piracy rather than stale complacency—perhaps in some ways infringing, but in the hope that some kind of good mutation would happen because of it.
A term like occulture is today widely used both within academia and in pop writing. Basically signifying the same thing as when P-Orridge coined the term: the sphere of impact in general society of building blocks or “memes” previously kept hidden for various reasons and thereby becoming glamorous enough to draw attention to themselves. Occulture is also when a previously occulted behavioral pattern or technique for effecting change in accordance with will is integrated in general society and accepted as reasonable behavior. The past decades’ wave of pop yoga and pop meditation could be seen as examples of this.
In 2009, a volume called Thee Psychick Bible was published by Feral House.1 The first edition also came with a DVD, with a selection of some of the early TOPY films. The book proper contains basically all documents and writings that were official TOPY teachings. What was surprising was not that most of it had matured quite nicely and wasn’t as dated as I think many old-timers had suspected. The most surprising thing was the interest in the market, so to speak. The first edition sold out, and a paperback version has been out since then, selling thousands of copies. This should indicate that there’s a respect for the TOPY phenomenon as such and that the ideas presented back then are equally valid today—if not even more so.
Psychic TV is still around, touring, making music and videos, predominantly as a psychedelic rock group called Psychic TV3. And I’m currently here in Copenhagen to show a film based on or inspired by PTV’s seminal 1983 album Dreams Less Sweet. I think it was American Apparel that earlier this year released a T-shirt with the “psychick cross,” a logo trademarked by P-Orridge. That was quickly removed. But it’s still interesting that in the psyches of these industrial hipster designers this symbol somehow exists and feeds back something quite substantial, regardless of whether they’re conscious of it or not.
Another interesting phenomenon today is of course the massive interest both within the art world and academia for predominantly Western esotericism. I’m not saying TOPY alone can take a bow for this, but, ending twenty-three years ago, there had certainly been a full decade’s worth of bringing out exactly that: artists dealing with topics spiritual, iconoclastic, or both. The recent exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s paintings has so far been seen by over a millon people. The Venice Biennale of 2013 was immersed in art and spirituality, displaying not only Jung’s Red Book but also Frieda Harris’s Crowley-designed Thoth Tarot paintings. In younger generations of artists, esoteric themes overflow, and when they backtrack in the more recent history of magic and esoteric art, they will surely find TOPY material or formulated thoughts somewhere along the line. Occulture abounds.
There is presently also a strong resurgence or romanticism when it comes to cottage industries, as in the emergence of a new cassette culture, vital vinyl editions, and fanzine publishing, including anachronistic use of Risographs and vintage Xerox machines. Again, we can’t say that TOPY deserves all the praise for this movement, because that would simply be too grandiose a statement. But the occurrence in itself certainly points nostalgically to a time when there was a massive and substantial pre-Internet expression of intimate philosophies, forgotten gems, as well as magical and/or marginal art rather than some kind of soulless mass-production manifestations.
4
Over the Moon and Back Again
Originally published in the Danish magazine Plethora (No. 5, 2016).
If your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ ll see you on the dark side of the moon.
PINK FLOYD, “BRAIN DAMAGE”
IT ISN’T EASY BEING HUMAN. Although we live longer and are helped along by technology and pharmaceuticals, we have no guarantee for either happiness or understanding of ourselves during a lifetime of pressure and stress. Where to look for guidance and insight? Well, there are basically two ways to go: in and out. Being introspective can certainly bring insights, but most often only touching upon the individual sphere. If we instead look outside and far away, we can see. . . . Yes what, exactly?
When the sun sets, we are wrapped in darkness and despair. Space is empty, black, enormous, containing myriad tiny, tiny starlights, and allegedly filled with devouring black holes, threatening asteroids, and aliens. Although science can explain things we can’t directly perceive with our senses, we are still sensory driven more than anything else. Always have been, always will be. When the sun rises, the senses are alerted. We can see what’s tangible, beneficial, detrimental, and we can make sober evaluations based on rational processes. Most of us structure our active lives based on the visibility of the sun and then retract when it’s no longer visible. One could say this is natural, in the sense of natural for optimal utilitarian use of the waking state.
But of course there is light also at night. We usually don’t see it because of all our own artificial lights. But the fact that it’s actually there provides primordial comfort. The moon, reflecting the sun that is currently busy elsewhere, has been the true guiding light for humans all along history. At times, during full eclipses, we may claim to be fascinated by a phenomenon in the sky. But in actual fact we’re instinctually terrified.
The sun affects us by heat and light in very direct, tangible ways. We take the sun for granted and adapt our lives and cultures around it. The moon, however, affects us by reflected light and magnetic force—quite a different story. The sun may permit life but the moon regulates it and thereby controls human destiny to a greater and more tangible extent.
The reflected light of the moon isn’t brutally revealing but faint, suggestive, ocularly conducive to tricks and impressions of association and fantasy. This reflected light is also conducive to beauty in that it lessens contrast and thereby inherent dualisms. This has been well used in our own recent culture through the development of photography and cinema, in which lighting techniques (an entire science!) very seldom focus on harsh, direct light but rather on subtle nuances of reflected light.
Because the sun is simply too bright to watch, we have become accustomed to watching the moon instead. We cherish what’s visible and fear what’s invisible. And as we know, anything regular is a
comfort to the human mind. In the case of the moon, it’s literally so. It’s not just a fairly familiar orb in the sky. We literally see the same side of the full moon most every time we watch it. The full moon always displays the same side to us as it revolves around its own axis parallel to its revolving around the earth, and that takes just about the same amount of time. No wonder then we’re as fascinated by the dark side of the moon as we are by the dark side of ourselves.
As the human gaze has gradually drifted from the macrocosmic to the microcosmic over the millennia, we have also downsized our capacity for understanding bigger contexts. For the sake of convenient storytelling, symbols in mythology used to consist of the most powerful and potent forces dressed in human or godly shape. Today, sadly, we’re striving for a brutal demythologizing process through technologies that allow neither longevity nor potent symbolism. Where is the mythological moon today?
All cultures have revered the moon, most of them as a feminine force in joint ventures with the masculine sun. Of course there are exceptions to the rule: the German language has the moon as masculine and the sun as feminine, and in many Eskimo stories the moon is a strong masculine force and the sun a warm, life-giving feminine force (not surprising perhaps, if one takes the Greenlandish climate into account!).
A key to mythological strength is the use of symbols within the stories told. No wonder that the sun and the moon have been such strong presences in human stories that most often retell sexual tales and death-and-rebirth mysteries. Any pantheon worthy of its name contains gods and goddesses attributed to the stronger forces out there in space. Moon goddesses abound. One of the first occurrences of moon divinities is actually a male one: the Babylonian god Sin. But from there and on, it’s been mostly goddesses.
Speculation about why this is can essentially only remain speculation. The most predominant argument is physiological-biological. The cyclic nature of the moon’s presence and visibility has always been easy for humans to interpret (rather than that of, say, Mars or Jupiter). The menstrual cycle of women normally sticks to a regularity of four weeks, and this fact must have been easily observable and transmittable very early on: hence an association that extended into culture. The ebb and tide of the sea also became attributed (correctly) to lunar forces, and could easily have been extended association-wise to the ebb and flow of menstruation and its ties to (in)valuable new life.
The Mediterranean cultures worshiped the moon reverently through its goddesses. The Egyptian Isis, the Greek Selene, the Roman Diana, and so on, cross-fertilized at night over time in mythic minds, and other pagan pantheons all over the world had already done that, and were/are still doing it. Aega, Aine, Anahita, Andromeda, Anunit, Arianrhod, Artemis, Arawa, Athenesic, Auchimalgen, Benids, Britomartis, Candi, Cerridwen, Chang-O, Coyolxauhqui, Dae-Soon, Gnatoo, Gwaten, Epona, Hanwi, Hecate, Hina Hine, Hina-Ika, Huitaco, Ishtar, Ix Chel, Izanami, Jezanna, Juna, Jyotsna, Komorkis, Kuan Yin, Lasya, Lucina, Luna, Mama Quilla, Mawu, Metzli, Rhiannon, Sadarnuna, Sarpandit, Sefkhet, Sina, Teczistecatl, Trivia, Xochhiquetzal, Yemanja, Yolkai Estsan, Zirna . . . The list may not be endless but it’s extensive enough to show how essential the moon goddess has always been in all insightful cultures. One indicative monotheistic demoting we find in the word trivial, stemming from the Roman goddess Trivia, and today indicating something unimportant and irrelevant. Another is the fact that the iconography of the powerful crescent moon associated with Luna and Diana later on became a symbol of chastity in the Virgin Mary.
The sexualization of planets via gods and goddesses is a language and process of necessity. If there is no myth circling around outer phenomena that are beyond our control, then despair quickly sets in. If there is no elevation or augmentation of banal, human toil into divine shape, then ditto. The merging of the masculine and feminine principles stemming from the immensely powerful cosmic forces and filtered through divine idealizations via myth is a safeguard for the human psyche—one that’s presently and hopefully only temporarily lost.
A higher awareness of the human mind itself, and of the necessity of an advanced open-minded culture, flourished during the (mainly Italian) Renaissance. Art and literature bloomed, and quite often with inspired strings attached to antiquity’s pantheonic health. Revitalized Neoplatonism catapulted both sciences and arts into a zone of esoteric open-mindedness and optimism. Add some book-printing progress to that, and the mythic reinforcement by cosmic iconographies added to the allure of what the Catholic Church had tried in vain to ban: a benevolent bouquet of human qualities rather than a monotheistic terror clutch. The richly detailed symbols of medieval alchemical imagery reintroduced the cosmic elements into human culture, and with that an appreciation of gods and goddesses rather than just one stern patriarchal force.
Paintings commissioned or sanctioned by open-minded princely courts could reintegrate an overt cosmic approach. The setting was usually simple: the sun and the moon affect human life, and we understand the connections via magic, astrology, and tolerance rather than via the Christian iconography of death and torture. In many ways, the Renaissance was a cultural rebirth made possible by the cosmic forces themselves, albeit in symbolic form.
One of the most beautiful images depicting this cosmic revitalization is Cristoforo de Predis’s fifteenth-century masterpiece De Sphaera (Of the Spheres). The section dealing with the moon depicts a beautiful naked woman within a concentric orb containing several other circular shapes. The biggest one, a foundation, contains a crab, symbolizing Cancer (the astrological sphere ruled over by the moon). Covering the woman’s sex is a lunar figure, serene and most often associated with the Greek goddess Selene. In her left hand is a torch symbolizing the dark-moon goddess Hecate, and in her right Diana’s hunting horn. Around her orb we see sky and sea, filled with waves and ships dependent on her visibility and grace for navigation and keeping time.
Thanks to the regularity of the moon’s visibility, we have adapted our structuring of time itself around her. Although we now have a larger (solar) 365-day calendar, we still live and work in lunar weeks, with four weeks making a full lunar month, and the first day of every week being the Moon’s Day (Monday, Måndag, Montag, Lundi, etc.).
But no matter what, nighttime is the right time. The beauty of nighttime illuminated by the moon in any of her phases accentuates the feminine connection. The dispersion of daytime’s contrast and hard shadows allows for a more poetic frame of mind, in which courtship, wooing, secret meetings, erotic pleasures, and so forth, are more likely to take place. All through human history, the moon has been associated with poetry as well as both sexual and romantic love: a swarming and looser mind frame made possible by the cool, suggestive softness of the night sky.
The negative aspect of the (mainly) full moon has been mythically captured in different cultures in the phenomenon of lycanthropy, that is, werewolves running wild. In many ways, this is a balance, albeit uncontrolled, to the feminine serenity. Lycanthropy can in many ways be seen as a form of male hysteria, set free by maximum exposure to the bright feminine light in the darkness, in which the primordial beast in the male goes on a rapacious rampage.
Other kinds of moon madness also occur in slightly milder forms, and have been validated throughout history in myths and accounts—but also in legislation. The Lunacy Act in England, formulated in 1845, “defined a lunatic as a demented person enjoying lucid intervals during the first two phases of the moon, and ‘afflicted with a period of fatuity in the period following the full moon.’”1 Today, we instead apply a sociopsychological model/matrix to criminal behavior in line with our utilitarian, causal, anthropocentric worldview. But does this imply that the moon no longer affects criminals (or others)? Of course not.
The race to actually, physically, get to the moon is an intriguing piece of history, preceded by thousands of fictional (and thereby mythical) accounts. As science fiction culture in pulp magazines, books, and their cinematic counterparts boomed during the first half of the twentieth century, the gene
rations growing up with it all were saturated by their own dreams turned incentives. Everything begins in fantasy, myth, and fiction, and space travel is certainly no exception from the rule. However, the actual facts make the mind boggle, jog, and spin like a rocket out of control.
Adolf Hitler’s attempts to destroy resistance from the British Isles during the final stages of the Second World War saw the development of the V2 rocket (later on mythologized in Thomas Pynchon’s techno-sexual absurdist drama Gravity’s Rainbow). The main engineer behind this powerful rocket-missile was Wernher von Braun. As soon as the war was over, the formerly pro-Nazi scientists of von Braun’s team weren’t put on trial but rather safely escorted to the United States and given top positions to develop their craft further.
In 1954, Walt Disney produced three films for his television series Disneyland, all focusing on space travel: Man in Space, Man and the Moon, and Mars and Beyond. The first show was aired in 1955 and was viewed by 100 million people—half of the American population at the time. The consultants and technical producers of the show were Wernher von Braun, Heinz Haber, Ernst Stuhlinger, and Willy Ley (a rocket aficionado who had actually fled from Nazi Germany in 1935. Parallel to developing rocket theories and experiments in the United States during the 1940s, he was also an avid science fiction/space travel writer). One of the 100 million people who watched this episode was Dwight D. Eisenhower, at that time president of the United States. He borrowed a copy of the film and showed it at the Pentagon. That in itself became the launch (pardon the pun) of the American space program, in that it facilitated the development of the first ever American satellite—and then some! Government officials were apparently as fascinated by the mix of rocket science and science fiction as were many other Americans. And Russians too, of course. This was in the midst of the Cold War, and the potential scenario of being able to blast an accursed enemy from space was enthusiastically funded by governments, now that Walt Disney had set the stage together with ex-Nazi scientists.
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