As with many things in human cultural development, major existential shifts took place and things became specialized and compartmentalized—a process still going on today, for good or bad. The mystically spiritual and ecstatic became organized in religions with professional proxy-priesthoods. The previously integrated artistic expressions as agents of willed change instead became particular professions for individuals with a specific talent. But where did this talent originally come from?
In our human progress, evolution, and development, we contain everything that’s passed before us in our DNA. We are like cosmic tape recorders in an ever-evolving process of refinement and adaptation. Special qualities needed for survival are passed on in tradition, myth, and genetic mass. This is still being conceptualized and expressed by artistically creative people in many fields. That’s their function, so to speak: to move everything onward and bring the good stuff along.
As mentioned before, this creative strain was divided into specialized skills and professions. Some became scientists, some historians, and some continued manifesting their own personal visions in externalized artistic forms. These have been some of the main sanctioned expressions and professions within human culture. But there have also been those who’ve retained a traditional yet highly experimental labor in working with the unseen and immeasurable. Sometimes these have been more or less integrated in society, but most often not. The magicians have most often worked on their own or in small groups of like-minded souls. Dealing with basically the same behavioral methods and questions but usually with an added ingredient: personal will—meaning that what is created also carries a charge that helps change things in unseen, immeasurable, and presently unknown ways.
When art as such became integrated as a more or less necessary but commodified field of work, it was still an expression of this same human need. We need art and culture as reflective surfaces, personal catharsis, and release, as something to initiate existential conversations and thought fodder—essential fuel for progress and development. Everyone knows that, and it’s always there. The amount of people actively dealing with art (as opposed to dealing in art) is minimal today compared to the totality of human beings, and yet the status is still high—that is, if the artist in question is successful. Even in the most totalitarian of societies, there is art to amplify the condoned, allowed, and encouraged agenda.
One should perhaps also enter the very sensitive question here: What exactly is art? There have been so many definitions over the centuries that one gets tired by the mere overview: Berenson’s life-enhancement angle; Tolstoy’s egalitarian, almost antibeatific angle; Goethe’s and later Steiner’s spiritual angle; Beuys’s social sculpture angle; Gurdjieff’s objective angle; Duchamp’s sardonically detached angle—it’s all one big mess or mesh of contradicting yet eloquent theories and postulates. It’s really no wonder that contemporary art theory is so ephemeral and elusive. Basically, the definitions seem to go intimately hand in hand with whatever tradition or school will soon be obsolete. The only common denominator that really seems to permeate all of them is art’s original function: a magical one. But that aspect is seldom looked upon with admiring eyes by our civilization’s defining minds.
What then of magic? It’s almost as chaotic there but more muddled and often quite vile. I think Aleister Crowley came up with the best definition so far: “Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” All other attempts seem quite futile compared to that.
Even in the most well-ordered and confined expressions the artist often feels a need to go beyond the formal norms and normal forms. Art history is packed with individual examples that have led themselves straight into Draconian measures because they felt some kind of need to. The same is the case in the history of science. The pioneers are seldom praised until the masses catch up. And then it’s usually too late to enjoy it. The deviators, rebels, iconoclasts have always been able to sneak at least some degree of seed sowing into works of art otherwise condoned and integrated in a wholesome totality of a “greater good.” This can vary from a new stylistic touch to an unseen piece of content, as in hidden symbols, or even conscious subversions of content or form, and so forth.
Basic psychology tells us that the artist needs to express him- or herself, almost compulsively, putting feelings, desires, skill, excellence, or even self-doubt in a form that touches people enough to cause them to react. The reaction becomes a validation not only of the process involved but also of course of the person and mind behind it all. When that’s not there, the frustration of invisibility and poverty abounds. When it is there, on the other hand, a deep-rooted sense of bliss and meaning takes hold. This vulnerability of the individual supports a strong system of market and moral control, which is something artists have far too often adapted to.
For reasons having to do with traditional stigma or ostracism, the magician has up until recently been quite content with working in silence or in a hidden sphere. Let’s not forget that the word occult means “hidden” in Latin. That, however, doesn’t mean that magicians and occultists have been less susceptible to personal sensitivity, weakness, and ego compensation. It’s quite often the contrary. But there’s one thing that usually sets their work apart from that of the artists. It’s the concept of defined will. A magician has a distinct sense of purpose, a (hopefully) well-thought-through plan and a goal for the work in question. If it’s a matter of a ceremony, it’s to uphold a balance and atmosphere. If it’s an active ritual, it’s to change something specific in the small or grand arena of life. The creative process then acts as a means and not an end in itself.
It’s interesting to note that magicians usually avoid the limelight, as the work itself holds precedence. The artist, on the other hand, can use both negative and positive visibility to his or her own benefit. That’s simply because our society needs scandalous individuals and outsiders in general to relieve collective tension. A successful and media-conscious artist works equally well as a movie star. At times, magicians appear who take on celebrity or notoriety status, but they can only expect flack or negative exposure. Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey are two well-known examples from the twentieth century.
So what unites these two protohuman endeavors that were once wholly intertwined? Some principal ties are:
Irrationality as key or necessary agent. The rational mind frame hampers genuine creativity.
Imagination and visionary ability. You trust what you perceive and not what others tell you to perceive.
Heavy emotional engagement in the creative process (as opposed to purely causal, detached labor). If you don’t feel and believe in what’s going on, everything will be a barren and soulless endeavor.
Externalization of inner processes. New life comes from within and moves outside.
Creation as an umbrella for a supra-ecstatic flow: more than mere “joy” in working. Elevated states of mind, ideas, and epiphanies as results of the mind being in neutral gear, so to speak.
Manifestation as building block or aggregate of experience. “A life’s work.” One thing leads to another, and if one is conscious of and grateful about it, many life-enhancing synchronicities will follow.
Integration of the symbolic. Naturalism is not possible and only pleases the rational mind. Where schooling within a tradition is often necessary, the development of one’s own language or code is crucial for maximum impact. In magic, this means, for instance, being schooled in one specific tradition like Western ceremonial magic and then drifting off into your own devices and methods. In art it could be schooling or being inspired within, for instance, surrealism, and then moving on in personal integrations of, for instance, scientific symbols and codes.
An integrated breach of the previous stage: tradition is transcended, not seldom aggressively. Rebels rebel in both instances. Hiccups and revolutions are necessary for overall health because the most radical and extreme occurrences always end up as rigid and conservative environments. Iconocl
astic bowel movements.
There is also another common key ingredient in this magical art-soup: intuition—that lovely nonrational flow of existence so cherished by Taoists and creative people. What exactly is it? It’s a temporary freedom from causal bonds and rational thinking that sets inner creativity and happiness free. It’s a well-known but pretty undefined positive state of mind that helps us a lot in decision making and creation. What would art be if intuition weren’t there? A mere outer construction work of ideas or concepts. What would magic be without intuition? A mere reading of a cosmic user’s manual. Trusting one’s intuition may be the most important ingredient there is. Especially so in an overall culture that is increasingly binary and dualistic in both outlook and method.
An artist in our sphere of the world usually works in a much more causal and commodified structure than a magician. In your studio, you create. That’s highly satisfying, but you also know that you have to get by by going through many motions to secure sustenance and exposure of your creations. That’s because our culture as such only really allows “approved” entrepreneurs and manufacturers of acceptable influx through complex systems of exhibition, appraisal, validation, criticism, and financial compensation. If you play the game by the rules you’re more than welcome to compete for your place in the sun of recognition and appreciation.
This is, of course, a generalized view of the situation, but no less true. Most artists unnecessarily restrain themselves by adapting to a very clearly defined set of rules. You fight and get bitter and disillusioned if you don’t succeed, or fight and get happy if you do. In a way, the outer circumstances dictate the inner feelings because there’s an outer arbiter or commander commenting and judging whether or not what you make has any value or merit as such.
But the direction should be from the inside outward. Yes, a filtering of external influx is inevitable and perhaps even essential. But it needs to be filtered on the inside, in the alchemical oven, in the fire, in the womb. Seeds come from the outside in, but the new life comes from the inside outward. That sexual or procreative analogy is a central one in both art and magic. Or should be. We should remember these kinds of very basic wisdoms from many bright minds within philosophy and magic, but perhaps specifically Buckminster Fuller when he declared: “Mimic nature and you can’t go wrong!”
Let’s zoom back to earlier phases when art was still ingrained with magic and vice versa. That is, when it had the power to change and not only entertain. When the power of the artwork, object, or performance wasn’t measured by transactions validating the creator in question but rather by whether the outcome of its charge was successful. The worth of the artist then lay in the ability to systematize and charge chosen artistic expressions, like a sculpture, dance, song, painting, and so on. Success in that sphere guaranteed an elevated status within the tribe or commune.
In my experience, however, it’s as if contemporary magic and its practitioners are lost in a maze of conservative content and very rigid traditional approaches to form when it comes to applying this ancient, primordial science and art to a modern world. It’s similar to the way art as such has been pushed back to being an aestheticized, commodified world of forms filtered through desperate and petty egos and their external commanders, with too much content and energy on the one hand and too much form and intellectual nervousness on the other. It seems both areas have become victims of our binary times, with rigidity and lack of courage as banners. The result is that positions become heavier and heavier in the choking illusion of safety, with occasional volcanic, psychic outbursts when the respective intellectual decompression chambers aren’t working as they should. There should be a healthier balance.
It seems I can’t deliver a lecture without returning to one of the most potent and beautiful metaphorical scenes ever in movie history: Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Disney’s Fantasia. In youthful enthusiasm yet ample laziness, Mickey uses magical tricks to make cleaning house simpler. This is to catastrophic results. But he learns his lesson well from the returning and very angry magician: one needs to know not only the tools of one’s trade but also to be very clear in what one wants to achieve with these tools.
What if a young generation consciously connected the currently separated ends of the power cable of meta-programmatic content and alluringly suitable form? And what if they not only joined forces but actually joined the very life force itself? It’s a very challenging thought and potentially a dangerous one.
During the past decade, a keen interest in esoteric protagonists, movements, and artists has seeped into the art world. We have, for instance, seen a revitalized appraisal of masters like Swedish painter Hilma af Klint. The exhibition that was at the Louisiana Museum (outside of Copenhagen) last year has been seen by over a million people all over Europe. That hardly sounds like an esoteric exhibition. In 2008, the Centre Pompidou in Paris housed an enormous exhibition called Traces de Sacré (Traces of the Sacred), which was an overwhelming celebration of art and the occult. The Venice Biennale of 2013 was packed with works of an occult nature, ranging from Lady Frieda Harris, the woman who painted Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck, Carl Jung’s Red Book, Borges’s imaginary beings, and on to Xul Solar’s collages. There are, nowadays, academic symposia focusing on the intersection between art and occult history. The term occulture is now almost mainstream and indicates previously esoteric themes as having been accepted and “exotericized.” Also, new generations of artists are reexpressing and integrating occult, religious, or spiritual themes in their own way, both in form and content. This could vary from using Goethe’s color schemes, listening to inner voices, experimenting with higher states of consciousness, allowing experiences in nature to shape one’s expressions via inclusion of distinctly occult iconography in images and other kinds of works. Quite simply, the colorful gray area between art and the occult is established and ever growing.
To a greater extent than ever before, young artists tend not to separate the process from the product, so to speak. The process can be magical, and the art object then becomes something that carries a charge beyond the merely esthetic or personally cathartic. In fact, in these times, an increasing number of artworks become talismans. They are the results of a consciously willed yet intuitive process, and they contain remnants not only of that process as a result but also energy that has been set in motion in a desired direction. Whether the partakers realize or know this is irrelevant. But that artists work with this kind of thinking and making is in fact highly relevant and healthy.
Where art for so long has touched upon attribute rather than on essence, there seems to be a shift going on in which the positions are being diametrically changed. The essential meaning becomes more important than that of the attribute of aesthetics and commercial value. This of course brings us back to primordial times when it was indeed more important that the artwork contained power than an attractive surface. When language gradually took over, rationality and structure followed suit. Yet the need for the primordial, magical expression has been there all along and now seems to finally resurface within its own perimeters.
This is without a doubt an effect of a too-rational culture gone overboard. In our desperation to survive as a species, let alone as individuals, different remedies are needed than the ones prescribed by a status quo complacency. This is an all-permeating and anxious movement in our present times. So it’s hardly surprising that art shrugs off some superficiality and assumes the responsibility it once had. Art should not only inspire us to live more fully and think free thoughts and feel free emotions. It should also present solutions and alternatives beyond the many rationalistic, materialistic, binary fallacies we have already experienced or committed. But the beauty of it all is that this is not going to happen in dogmatic, intellectual ways or through an abstract, postmodernist discourse. It’s going to be more direct, vibrant, alive, poetic, emotional, violent, and expressive. Although perhaps shaped in entirely new languages and codes, it won’t be hard to i
nterpret at all. It’s going to be guided by intuition and survival instinct and not by faint references to previous “isms” or demagogic simplifications to alleviate bad Western consciences. Individual intuition may be that original state of grace so brutally shoved aside by monotheistic religion to pave the way for hubristic self-destruction. The art that catches this drift and integrates protohuman desire and behavior will become the talismanic art that will literally help save the world as we know it and love it.
Footnotes
*1. The Real Magic series that ran from 2015 to 2016. This specific lecture was followed by a conversation with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.
*2. For instance, see Gordon Kennedy’s highly recommended Children of the Sun: A Pictorial Anthology from Germany to California 1883–1949.
*3. For instance those by Sutin, Booth, Churton, Kaczynski, Lachman, Symonds, et al.
*4. This project was made possible through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the archive including all recordings is now housed in the U.S. Library of Congress. In 2016, the recordings were released in a CD box with an accompanying booklet by Dust to Digital.
*5. For more on Aleister Crowley and Lord Alfred Douglas, please see Nina Antonia’s “Bosie and the Beast,” in Carl Abrahamsson, ed., The Fenris Wolf, no. 8 (Stockholm: Trapart Books, 2016).
*6. For more on my interpretation of the Babalon concept and formula, please see “Babalon” in The Fenris Wolf, no. 6 (Stockholm: Edda Publishing, 2013).
*7. An exhibition of occult-themed artworks called “Language of the Birds” was on display at the 80WSE Gallery parallel to the conference, which was held at New York University from February 5–7, 2016.
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