One group or splinter fragment can’t tell the entire story, as historians so well know. The more parts we have from the same totality, the bigger the picture, of course. Firsthand sources have a tendency to die, but secondhand ones have so far lived on for thousands of years, through the blessings of diligent monks (and others who could write and duplicate texts) and primitive printing presses. The more firsthand experiences that will be correctly documented and relayed, the clearer the overall picture. And here’s exactly where will-fueled initiatives like magical publications, be they “order-biased” or not, have a huge advantage over academic writing, as they not only can but rather inherently insist on expressing emotion and wonder as well as mere chronological, factual accounts and further bibliographic references. That holistic dynamic of enchantment is required to fully “get” the picture. History as such, esoteric or otherwise, is never objective in its creation.
If a piece of writing doesn’t express some sort of subjective emotionality or a distinctly personal experience, we have to cock an eye at its validity as historic “meme.” If there’s a too chronological or too distanced an approach, we can be certain that there’s been an adjusted editorial process in action, usually in the name of objectivity. A peer review can just as easily be spelled peer pressure. And this, paradoxical as it may sound, is of course always biased and partial.
Don’t forget that the biggest chunk of the word history is story. The more subjective stories we have, the better we can create our own synthesis, our own individual Gesamt-evaluation.
Magical experimentation in various fields of natural sciences, arts, music, literature, and so forth have later on become fundaments of “established” dogma in these fields. Perhaps what we have to consciously take into account now is the importance of “scripting” the future through various magical publications and shared efforts. Some aspects of science seem to be catching up a bit, but the magical sciences will always be way ahead when it comes to human potential research. I believe that all of the idealistic fanzines and small publications from these past decades will later on be looked upon as seeds, as sperm, waiting and waiting to fertilize some human mind-womb of the future. The ejaculatory process is swift and violent; human development not quite so.
I can sense (vague, I know, but deliberately so) that there has been an increase in occult diplomacy during the past decade, circa 2000 to 2010. This has, according to me, very much taken place through an energy-level increase in periodicals, books, and human interaction (symposia, conferences, festivals, and so on, not forgetting the integration of esoteric subjects and courses within academia, which has been a great step forward).
The Internet hasn’t really turned out to be a garden of occult wisdom (not the same as information), but has certainly become useful as an extended address book and PR tool. Traces of the networking and sharing of resources, as experimented with in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in the 1980s, for instance, shifted shape and did indeed become a digitized storehouse of potential, albeit still dressed in the emperor’s new clothes. The exchange of pompous, Masonic-looking certificates of mutual recognition has been replaced by a more thorough exchange of substantial information on grassroots levels, a merging of minds through tangible means, and a pragmatic occasional union based on tolerance. If the general objective is to further the individual in her attempts at elevation, of necessity tied in with a larger planetary need for survival strategies, then sectarian approaches and retentive affiliations might not be the best idea. Am I deluded when I claim that a new wave of occult publishers has been very instrumental in this Mercurial greasing process?
If Aleister Crowley hadn’t worked so hard on publishing his occult writings in good, solid editions, he would very likely have been remembered merely through references from the gutter press of his time—like a vilified footnote in the history of British debauchery. Crowley’s ambitious efforts not only at writing but also at publishing his thoughts and ideas, and his Herculean labor of hustling copies (truly the “Great Work” for us all!), in many ways constitute the foundation of the extremely vital journal- and book-publishing environment we enjoy at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and which, in turn, will help change minds, perceptions, and cultures now and in the future to a much greater extent than, I suspect, Crowley could ever foresee.
And let’s not forget the magnificent entertainment aspect of occult publications. Idealism really is a lovely thing. There doesn’t need to be a conflict between substance and lack of distance. No arena of human endeavor has been more touched by divine(?) madness than occultism. Delusions of grandeur in unchecked contexts create a splendidly entertaining stratification process. But when it’s only spewed out in ugly and eye-draining Internet fora, who really cares? I see a very bright future for printed matter containing idealistic expressions, and one of many reasons for that view is that it takes real effort and real knowledge to create something that others want to touch and be touched by. Immediacy and complacency are usually very snug bedfellows.
Within this spectrum of efforts, there is one very usable common denominator that is also one of the cornerstones of magical practice: you use what you have and you use it to the maximum. You can’t use more than you have in magic. If you’re deluded and think that you can, it will very soon be made clear that you can’t. Ritual magic and its synchronistically sparkling mind-universe isn’t a credit-based economy. You are what you are and you have what you have. If you can play with that, it’s likely that you can change certain things for the better. That mere potential of change is of course also exactly what attracts the Napoleon-Cleopatra contingent of “spiritual” loonies, that is, those without a solid firmament of substantial self-knowledge. But today they are more likely to ramrod online than to make books and magazines that require hard work and slightly more than an imagined crowd of admirers.
Looking back at the post-punk era and its spontaneous expressions, we find that the ones that have lasted, in the sense of still having a tangible presence, are those with a genuine will to express something, and then an intelligence to express and shape that into a form that speaks to its desired audience. As we’re mainly book nerds here on these pages, I will leave the immense spectrum of music. Suffice to say that the DIY ethic, from the 1960s and onward (and with a particularly forceful impetus in the late 1970s), has created a great many cottage industries producing truly unique musical works, packages, products, concerts, and so forth. Most of these instigators used what they had access to and nothing more. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Is there a lesson here, why those products today (usually) fetch a higher secondhand price than a “top-ten chartbuster” that was issued in a gazillion copies? Of course there is. And the same goes for books, periodicals, and artworks.
Many thousands of years ago, the proper development of papyrus (Egyptian water reed) enabled a more elaborate and extensive writing process. A focus on religious and magical topics in writing was of course prevalent all over the Mediterranean hotbed of philosophy and spiritual speculation. The esoteric transmission may still have been oral, but as the Christian tyranny grew in fervor and indiscriminately killed off philosophers and burned manuscripts, the need for duplication and documentation became painfully obvious. The symbol of Alexandria’s library burning (possibly the most vile act of terrorism ever) is relevant in the history of magical writing.
And then, there was . . . Well, I think you know that story quite well. And perhaps it’s more interesting to start thinking about the future, now that we can safely study how the history of human ideas and creativity has been so eminently safeguarded by many wise women and men of various shades and shapes. Is it perhaps now our turn to face the future and leave something inspirational behind?
The magico-existentialist punches remain the same: Who are you? What do you have? What do you want to express? Find out in a genuinely honest way and you’re halfway there already. As for the future: script it and script it well!
14
Originally published in the Canadian magazine Pillars (forthcoming, 2018).
A man and a woman were hanging round each other’s necks. Nearer and nearer drew the corybantic throng; louder and louder the sound of the shouting. But my brace of revellers had turned now into one single form, half male, half female—a hermaphrodite, seated on a throne of pearl. On its head was a crown of a bright red wood, on which the Worm of Destruction had gnawed mysterious runic figures. Pattering blindly behind came a flock of miniature sheep, in a cloud of dust—perambulating provender that the strange apparition trailed in its wake to feed its train of dancing dervishes.
GUSTAV MEYRINK, THE GOLEM1
ONCE UPON A TIME, as my loathing for the art-world subspecies phenomenon “curator” grew and grew, I philosophized a lot about the nature of art. Is it at all possible to define what art is or means? If possible, for whom would such a definition be beneficial?
The more I thought about it, the closer I got to the very roots of human culture. Initially, art was tied in with magic, which was tied in with life itself. “Instigating magical change through aestheticized personal expression, thereby enhancing the experience of life” was the closest I could get in my own definition. Whether this just rang true as a justification for my own disdain for soulless, postmodern, intellectual art or actually works as a general definition, I don’t know. But it made me think of the possibilities involved. So much (basically all) of primordial art consists of integrated talismanic essence. If art needs to be magical to be art and magic always inherently expresses itself through art, then it’s just a matter of being (sub)conscious in the execution, isn’t it?
The classic concept of the golem arose from the depths as I first actually associated the word talismanic with jewelry, smaller objects, sigils on surfaces, and so on. But the grand scale, in which externalized forces actually come alive and move about, is sometimes more alluring than the miniature world. Another aspect intruded: tangibility versus intangibility. Where so much of contemporary art is produced in order to be not only tangible and visible but also commodified in adaptation to a market, wouldn’t it be interesting to create art that is intangible and invisible? And that despite this moves about and manifests change?
I remember vividly how greatly I was affected by Gustav Meyrink’s classic “more Poe than Poe” novel The Golem in my youth. And that film trilogy by Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen from the 1910s (The Golem: Monster of Fate, The Golem and the Dancing Girl, and The Golem: How He Came into the World) was truly mind-boggling stuff that helped solidify a romanticized pop notion of what a magical golem being is, and totally on par with Dr. Frankenstein’s more well-known creation.
But Meyrink’s book contains deep implications beyond the merely “fantastic.” Integrated in a fairly muddled narrative are facets of dreamscapes, multiple (or should we say interchangeable?) personalities, upheaval of linear time, reverence for the hermaphroditic, and distinct magical thinking. The golem itself thereby becomes more than a feared mythological projection in history, and instead becomes a representation of a dynamic human psyche outside the confines of order and waking, rational rigidity—which is basically what art should be a projection out of/from—at least under the umbrella of my own, above-mentioned definition. I realized that I wanted to create a soulful “mega golem” as a counterforce to postmodern intellectualism and commodified, tangible surfaces.
I have given the subject much thought, and the nearest I can get to the truth of it seems to be this: that once in every generation a spiritual disturbance zig-zags, like a flash of lightning, right through the Ghetto, taking possession of the souls of the living to some end we know not of, and rising in the form of a wraith that appears to our senses in the guise of a human entity that once, centuries ago, maybe, inhabited here, and is craving materialization.2
So how to apply a celebration of the golem as concept on concrete execution and tasks? In my own case, the first phase contained less thinking and more doing. In 2011, British artist Vicki Bennett invited Cotton Ferox (that is, Thomas Tibert and me) to make a piece of music for a program called “Radio Boredcast.” As we had already been experimenting with magically charged texts within the confines of charged music, this turned out to be a very natural progression. The difference was that this became the first “Mega Golem Official Transmission.” The text was written as the first investment in the “corpus”—in this case the Mega Golem’s cock and balls, a suitable place to begin when creating something. I wrote the text, recorded it, and integrated it in the Cotton Ferox album (and film) A Mega Golem Official Transmission:
A Mega Golem Official Transmission (Penis & Testicles)
The following is an official Mega Golem Broadcast Transmission of Cock and Balls presence and a declaration of moral independence in the digital ether. May the Mega Golem live long and prosper!
I’m envisioning time right now. Time is slow-moving, a soft staccato when we watch it, like the slow motion of the film and television segments we have grown up to love. We only see parts of the image flow we’re supposed to in our mechanical sensory hegemony, and instead our minds try to patch up the fragments and make a new, more or less cohesive sequence; one that appears to be slow, regardless of whether the “measured” time from beginning to end is the same or not.
Measuring doesn’t in any way indicate or display objective truth. Measuring is just a language in itself for those who speak measurian. Remember, for instance, that in the old days, sports used to be competition between individuals or teams of individuals. Today it is very much a self-righteous romance of measurement frenzy. Fractions of measured items and units are compared. Achievement is no longer a human trait of triumph but rather something that receives existence by the measurement and integration into the technology of statistics. Are we robots? Are we not? Well, they certainly are.
Let us therefore measure no more. The proof is not in the pudding any more than size matters. What matters is charge and discharge, passion, contrast, conflict, energy, ejaculation, emission, the strength of the moment in its own dissolving. There are no more supernovas or black holes in the universe, only an endless multicolored flow of energy that is a reflection of subjective truth. What’s not to love about that? In fact, you can absolutely be that dissolved moment yourself. Please take some time—the slow kind—and think about it.
People seem happy to talk about the concept of the attention span but then they immediately forget why. If one more advertising campaign tells me that their product can simplify my life, I will have to use force in my decline of their offer. Nothing complicates more than new simplifications. Want simplicity? Well, begin by discarding all those simplifying tools. Want an attention span? Well, stop thinking about it. Want more time? Well, cease your agenda chopping. Want a slower time? Well, do less.
Time and time again, timeless time, philosophers have suggested remedies. They’re all good in their own peculiar way. Do less doesn’t mean that, literally or necessarily, but just do less in that contemporary manner that fragments your view into tiny pieces—all measurable of course—and instead do more in painting a bigger picture: your own picture. Reclaim your own mind and everything will be totally fine. You will be disillusioned and slightly bitter of course because you will realize that you have wasted exactly what you have now reclaimed: TIME. However, in the end nothing matters. But until then, some things do. Your own mind, for instance, and your own time.
So, okay, freedom is actually here now. It’s a joy, a blessing, an existential goodie bag of options. Will is here too. Hi, Will! How are you? Doing well, I hope. Actually, I know you’re doing well. I’m happy about it. We’re meshed in the afternoon and around the clock of measured time. And outside the circles of that other time too, of course. “Love lifts us up where we belong.”
So many options. So many potions. Diligence has paid off . . . doubt. Perseverance has paid off . . . persecution. I’m now in a position that is ble
ssed, fully integrated in a Mega Golem’s cock and balls. What a magnificent privilege. There will be others in the same position after me, I’m sure, but right now it does feel like a genuinely pioneering exploration of possibilities. My will be done! My will in the Mega Golem’s cock and balls. Right-o, here we come!
The writing is read and the reading is right. Never have I been able to express myself any better than in that little sentence. It’s like a prison sentence of an immeasurable freedom, a sui generis je ne sais quoi of a fait accompli that really sums me up. If I could tap and sell that, I’d be a gazillionaire. But of course it’s neither tappable nor for sale, and I like that. And I’m still a gazillionaire of sorts.
Which brings us to pecuniary possibilities. They overflow. I am amazed. Have money? Here I am. Thank you very much. I’m polite and grateful and you have just been in contact with someone you probably needed to be in contact with. Simple as that. Every situation is a potential win-win situation and that’s why the pecuniary flow passes through me but also leaves a staggering residue of affluence and a more-than-enoughish taint. Best to invest with zest at my own behest!
Now, what exactly is it that I do? Am I in the right position? Well, I look and see and then I recount in my own way. This has happened, take it or leave it. I used to think this was escapism or a psychological-emotional fulfilment, but it’s not. It’s about making a contribution to the unlimited collage, the Quantum Quilt, that is the overall human existence on this planet and in this omniverse. History-writing in four or even more dimensions. Yes, I write, I read, I cast an occasional spell, I aspire, I inspire, I take pictures, I make pictures like reflection surfaces, I’m the Mega Golem’s cock and balls—a really privileged position to be in, I should add—and I enjoy it more than I dare to even admit (probably for superstitious reasons).
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