The intention was to come to LiveJournal every day and jot down some 'Dear Diary' note that recorded what I was doing with whom - without frightening the horses.  What has happened instead is that some idea will bug me for a few days and the result is some sort of essay as I work things out in my own mind.  A few of you will read it and I move on ...

The work progresses well and I hope to get a decent holiday before too long but this week was really about my own exploration of the many ideas pouring in from our work in the new media, from the political world and from the Treadwells community.  David Beth's presentation (see last Posting) was added to by a stimulating conversation on Thursday at the Treadwells 'Salon' with David Blank, Editor of The Oracle, and by my reading of Dave Evans' The History of British Magick After Crowley [Hidden Publishing, 2007].

Evans' book is not as coherent or as academic as I think he might like to think it is - Christina has called it a 'romp' and a 'romp' it is - but it is an immensely useful compendium of information about a sub-culture that is scarcely understood even amongst its practitioners.  We are talking here about a very small number of people in a national context with a continuous history that goes back only a matter of decades rather than centuries.  Yet it is equally clear that these people are exploring existence in metaphorical ways that really do engage with 'that of which nothing can be spoken' [Wittgenstein]

A lot of thinking in these circles is really about perceptual change - in some cases it is the ultimate in Idealism by which willing can seem to change the facts of the matter and create new matter (actually, new social relations and a re-valuing of matter rather than its actual displacement).  These people are not clinically insane, they are not saying that they can turn a table into a chair without a saw, nails and a hammer.  They are saying that 'things change' in the way the bits of the world relate to each other, that matter is how things relate to each other as much as it is mere matter and that, because we are socially constructed, we can choose to change the world through an intelligent exercise of will.  So far so good.

There strikes me to be two aspects to the case that go beyond the sort of faith in something that a religious person might have, indeed that a Wiccan or Heathen might have.  The first is the use of technique to transform oneself in the context of this social reality and the second is the use of technique to exert will over others - the last bit is the one that most disturbs the Right Hand Path lot because it implies power not merely to be over or about oneself but a matter of enslaving the will of others to enhance one's power and acquire material things, not excluding the exertion of sexual will over the vulnerable.  It seems like a licence to the predator and there is something of that in some of those who would follow Julius Evola.

There is an ambiguity in the Left Hand Path.  Is it a means of using (say) transgression and recalibrating the brain from within so that one is reconstructed, not necessarily in any fixed way but liberated from the mental models of one's inheritance, whether familial or social?  Or is it about expressing that self as an instrument of manipulation?

Either way can be little more than a ritualised expression of Stirner's rather adolescent egotism, the politics of 'moi' - with his radical Idealism ending up as a solipsistic anarchism that is almost begging for the rest of society to either ignore the person as eccentric or snuff them out as unproductive.  It is Magick at its most childishly aristocratic even if the game is fun until the player actually grows up or runs out of money.

Similarly, if it is mere manipulation - and one can see some damned clever tricks for the art in Liber Null - then it really is not that much farther along in terms of sophistication than Neuro-Linguistic Programming, the last port of call of the anxious middle manager.  No, there must be more to all this than an over-complicated technique for closing that sale or getting that girl or trying to twist oneself into knots applying Sanskrit injunctions to daily life in Chalfont St. Giles.

I think we should be more courageous in dismissing some of the will-to-power aspects of the fraternity and, perhaps, being a little more suspicious of all cloaking of non-religious non-community paganism in ritual.  The fates of Crowley, Parsons and so many other practitioners suggests that Magickal persons may have a rip-roaring life and plenty of fun on the way but that they do not tend to end up at the top of the pile in terms of wealth, status (except occasional notoreity) and even love - if love means much more than serial bonking.

Ritual strikes me as valuable only if it is part of a community of souls - as in the Wicca, Druidic or Heathen traditions - or as a bonding game - as in Sex Magick which really is a more serious matter than the prurient will admit - or as something one does to build and develop inner soul.  

From this perspective, I was excited (that is the precise word) by David Blank's brilliant exposition of his Feral Sorcery in Oracle No. 8 in which, in a profoundly poetic way, he fixes himself in a sense of place and in a community through private ritual practices that clearly re-order the mind to see the environment in a completely fresh way.  I know from my conversation with him that his 'magic' is exhausting and a privileging, beyond what most people could accept, of soul over body.  It requires the will to reach mental states that give him more than mere existing can do.

But is Magick merely self-taught psychotherapy that stops the punters from wasting £60 an hour on alleged 'professionals' who hook you for years and leave you much as they found you?  If so, then its self-development aspects are not much better than the relationship between will-orientated external magick and NLP.  The techniques might be proven to work in taking a troubled teenager and teaching them, through transgression and role play (Cthulhu included), to learn how to create a personal morality and adjust to the world on terms that enable them to function.  There are a lot of arguments for the whole range of pagan thinking as massive improvements on Sunday School in socialising kids.  But that is not quite what LHP Magick is claiming to offer.

These thoughts may seem critical of Magick.  They are not.  Each stage has been necessary from a base line when someone could be persecuted (Oscar Wilde), imprisoned (Witchcraft Acts), ridiculed and forced into grey conformity, to be marched to a front line, to die for a country in which they had no stake, to today's diversity and liberty.  Chaos Magic, in particular, has made wonderful fun of po-faced ritualists.  But I wonder whether Magick rather enjoys not being out in the world and whether it has a dash of the martyr complex.

I suggest - without having the answer here and now - that the future of Magickal thinking lies in arguing for it in more rigorous terms in terms of what it does for the person far away from getting some end in view, even for itself.  In other words, moving far away from the alternative-to-NLP and alternative-to-pschotherapy models towards a stronger sense of its function in exploring liminality and that 'of which nothing can be spoken'.  

Analytic philosophy, for example, has completely failed to go beyond its own logical rules.  Science (despite the advances of mathematics far beyond my comprehension and probably yours) can say nothing of certain things.  Art merely raises the question of 'that of which nothing can be spoken' without answering its own questions.  Psychology tells us of it in terms only of descriptions of functions that still do not say what it is.  Religion comes closest - when it is numinous or talks of such things as the mysterium tremendum - but it still requires faith where perhaps there is no faith to be had.

Perhaps 'that of which nothing can be said' must really be explored outside of faith as such and, in a philosophical inversion of 'faith, hope and charity', we might consider that faithlessness can be matched with the sort of liberating hopelessness of existentialist philosophy while a denial of charity is only a denial of that patronising manipulative giving that infantilises and debases the receiver of charity.  In this dynamic of radical egalitarianism, faithlessness and existentialism, the poetic of Magick ,where words and gestures express psychological truths as a new art form that is lived by the Magickal person, might get us out of the holes of both ritualism and the more self-indulgent fumblings of the wilful chaotic.

David Blank's Feral Sorcery strikes me as a perfect example of such poesis - an intention from within, a felt-ness about existence, expressed as gestures and words performed in a place and a time.  The paradox (and all is paradox, even my writing this is paradoxical given my severe rationalism in the conduct of my private affairs) is that this culture of inverting faith, hope and charity leads almost directly to a real faith in oneself and one's work, a sense of liberation at choosing the meaning of one's life oneself and a generosity of impulse to all those without one's advantages that is no longer the 'gifting' from above but a sharing from the side.

David's key point in conversation was of his being integrated into community.  I took that not to mean being integrated by the community on its terms, but choosing to integrate the community into oneself on one's own terms.  The difference is important because it means that instead of being alienated, we transform society simply by being who we are.  Old-fashioned socialists might recognise this as the problem of alienation that most exercised the young Karl Marx.  The corollary is that solipsistic will to power or the use of technique to master one's environment is simply mimicking what one is fighting against, aggressive consumer liberalism and the mastering of the environment as mere tool.  In any straight fight between the individual and the world on such terms, the world will win - it has the guns, the money and the media.

The Magickal world of Crowley, Parsons and even LeVey used shock and transgression to open up the possibility of the human to absolute self-realisation.  Having achieved this shock factor, it would seem absurd now to have each generation repeat the same show over and over again, so that , eventually, it would be the most transgressive and shocking thing to introduce national patriotism, compulsory grey suits, sexual abstinence until the age of 21 and enforced military conscription.  What a triumph of transgression that would be!

Magick having played its role in separating the individual from enslavement in the collective, surely the next stage is to reintegrate the individual into the collective but on terms where it is the individual using will and knowledge to transform society - but then I was born and will die a radical and I have no doubt that I have had several Magickal spells directed at me for my presumption :-)

Tags: new religions
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: calm

Away with evil [see last posting] - or should I be so complacent?  The week has been an entertaining one, with two interesting lectures at Treadwells and the Harry Potter movie seen earlier today.  At last, slowly but steadily, a number of things are coming together on the business front - a sensible repositioning of Pendry White for changes in the PR market should be completed by the end of the summer and we are in the final stages of a new TPPR web site with its own international relations and terror blog (launch targeted for August 27th).

The lecture by Peter Jennings on the Heathen priesthood was interesting enough - not least for his personal expression of 'faith'.  This indicated the profound depth of feeling amongst those who have engaged deeply with the new 'reconstructed' pagan religions.  

Two days later, David Beth, an articulate young German from public service stock, gave a very coherent and stimulating account of a pagan German secret society from the second post-Nietzchean wave of German romanticism (1870s). This was forced underground successively by national socialist racial politics and then by the taint of association of romantic irrationalism with national socialism in post-war Germany.  The society has been revived by Beth and no doubt partially transformed by him (he mentioned Evola, of whom more in due course) in a model that was clearly one part Germanic by philosophy (idealist rather than existentialist), one part Germanic by cultural heritage, with talk of Ragnarok and Frigg, and one part gnostic-hermetic with all the expected debt to Jung and Ascona.

This was 'aristocracy of the soul' stuff and is part of a new trend to rediscover roots in the defeated powers of '45 that is as inevitable as it was once feared.  In my view, it is a necessary part of the healing of '45 and I would have few concerns if all those involved were as intelligent and self-aware as Beth. But I do have concerns and I think we need to be aware of what is happening more widely in global culture.

The racial and imperialist aspects of both German and Japanese culture have perhaps dissipated, but the culture suppressed in 1945 by the combined force of Western rational liberalism and Marxist scientific materialism went underground - it was never crushed completely.  It has not merely returned as a transformed 'spirituality' in these countries.  We also see those who 'collaborated' in other countries, in the great struggle against the West and Bolshevism, re-emerge - in a revived Hindu nationalism, in the re-emergence of the European Right in The Low Countries, France, Spain and Italy (and elsewhere) and, paradoxically, in the many East European petty nationalisms and fascisms. 

We even see traces of it in the development of that post-Baathist 'Caliphate' traditionalism that, owing some debt to the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, has emerged as 'Al-Qaeda'.  In short, the irrational politics of tradition, identity and the soul - and of blut and kultur however defined - is back with a vengeance.  A relatively few 'souls' can now wreak destructive power far beyond anything such irregulars could have done fifty years ago while troubled elites see traditionalist ideas as a means of capturing and retaining power where democracy enables it.

Something culturally significant is happening.  Much of it comes down to frustration with both traditional religion and with the Enlightenment and by the hole on the Left left by the failure of both Marxism and secular liberation movements.  Just as Baathism was twin brother of Zionism, so 'Caliphate' Islamism is arising out of the ashes of the failures of the secular leftist liberation strategies of the PLO and of the more sensible pre-Saddamite versions of the Baathism.

What interested me on Thursday was that (although I am of the Left) I could see that Beth's spiritual and non-political secret society was reaching out to something lost in people's souls - that drive for the coherent irrational that is always going to  be more holy and more meaningful than the politically correct nonsense forced on us by both market democracy in the West and by a world of all-too-appropriate behaviour, rights, duties and citizenship.  One person of German descent at the event (in conversation afterwards) was clearly attracted by that aspect of David's talk that was 'tribal' - it reached down to the roots of her personal Yggdrasil.  Peter Jennings, of course, was more pragmatically British about all this, but the strength of feeling about identity and culture was still there in his talk.  In short, many people are ready for something that roots them in their ancestors and their place - in blut und boden.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with this if it develops within a classic secular liberal culture, the law is obeyed and no-one is forced to make temple blood sacrifices or mount revenge raids on the next street ... but my concern is where this desperate need to belong and to believe may be taken by less scrupulous and more manipulative operators.

A recent popular book on paganism [Richard Rudgley, Pagan Resurrection: A Force for Evil or the Future of Western Spirituality, 2006] raises some of the issues, albeit without much sophistication and exaggerating the political potential of what he calls the Second Odinic Experiment (essentially the post-war appropriation of Odin by the Westen Radical Right).  Nevertheless, he is raising some serious issues that are being completely ignored by the mainstream media. It is highly probable that some of these developments are being monitored by the security services and simultaneously studiously ignored, or becoming a matter of denial, by the politicians they serve (much like the Minister of Magic studiously ignores the return of Lord Valdemort until the bugger is presented to his own eyesight in the current Harry Potter movie) .

Japan is a type-case in the potential for revival of the dark side.  China is emerging from being a poor Communist superpower, hitherto constrained by the West, and is becoming a major global economic player that may well be in partnership with the USA in the coming struggle to manage a resource-rich but anarchic third world that has to be policed to keep the global economic system working.  From a Japanese perspective, this means that the American strategic umbrella may not be so secure in the century to come if China flexes its growing muscles and so (like many European Atlanticists) Japan is developing an instinctive rhetoric of 'traditional values' that elides into a wider nationalist defiance of global change.  This is not the nationalism of imperial expansion but a defensive nationalism that arises from a fear of economic strangulation and of uncontrollable change as new powers emerge on the block.  Japan is becoming inward-looking towards those national roots that will give some 'bottom' to its identity.

Germany, too, is both strong and weak.  The 1945 Settlement (as in Japan) created the basis for its economic success but it also handed over control of foreign and security policy to what are now increasingly unreliable masters.  If China psychologically overwhelms Japan, so Russia psychologically overwhelms Germany - in both cases, Russia and China have long memories of unparallelled slaughter that the Germans and Japanese insistently either try to ignore or argue away.  

This is why the Poles caused such disquiet in the discussion over the European Treaty - they raised what their population would have been in numbers if the Germans had not occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945.  It was not merely bad manners.  A claim based on events 60 or more years ago threatened to re-open wounds from a European Civil War (1914 to 1945) that could still return in a muted form to rip apart politically a Continent living on the lie that liberal values can crush ancient hatreds by ignoring them.  When liberals rewrite history, they expect it to stay rewritten.

The relevance of pagan thinking to this may seem distant.  Ridgley's book is unsatisfying precisely because he is sympathetic to pagan thought and yet his story tells of its systematic appropriation by the extreme Right.  He cannot bring himself to criticise Odinic thinking nor its darker aspects.  In fact, much of what passes for paganism is not so much paganism as traditionalism - there is not only state-sponsored Shinto in Japan to deal with but there is (not uncoincidentally) those Arab writers from the era of the Mongol invasions who are emerging as the ideologists of 'Caliphate' Islam.  It seems not accidental that Polish neo-fascists in government, Islamic extremists and 'divine wind' Japanese nationalists can all centre their narratives ultimately on national resistance to the Mongol horde.  Today, the West in all its manifestations, including Communist [scientific materialist] China, is the Mongol Horde to many middling nations under threat from rapid global change.

Beth''s secret society is not sinister at all - its narrative myth is attractive, even sexy in its way.  I loved it - as noble fantasy.  Wiccans and most neo-pagans, too, love nature and the rest of humanity in a way that is wholly benign.  Jewish and Islamic cultures have rich magical aspects that are only now being explored in any depth in the West.  I could go on - neo-paganism is largely a positive and benign force in the world.  But we have to be on guard ... because traditionalism and paganism are not the same thing and the attempted appropriation of the latter by the former when it switches out of Judaeo-Christian mode is something to be very wary of in the covens and moots of Britain.

Out there, there are people that are frightened.  They see their identity under threat.  They see changes that they cannot adapt to.  They are looking for crutches.  Whether it be the 'leaderless resistance' strategies of terrorism migrating from Christian Identity to extremist Odinist circles and on to Al-Qaeda or the national manipulation of folk religions like Shinto, we have to stop being naive about the connexion between religion and politics in general and the possibility of the manipulation of neo-pagan thinking in particular.  Precisely because most neo-pagans are ignorant of or uninterested in politics, they must be vigilant.  

The history of David's 'Secret Society ' is its own warning from history - pagan-inclined men of good faith were displaced by the appropriation of German culture by something that even Hitler considered absurd, the potty neo-paganism of Guido von List, of Karl von Wiligut, of the Ahnenerbe and of Heinrich Himmler.  Once that madness and its equally mad pseudo-science was discredited, two generations of Germans dared not explore the profound ideas at the very heart of this and other societies.

But what is troubling is who might be rehabilitated and who might not as we go deeper into the current century.  This may not be the gentle world of former imperial civil servant Gerald Gardner.  This could be the world of Savitri Devi, of Julius Evola and Miguel Serrano.  Athough some of these thinkers (notably Evola) have things of value to impart if only in stimulating debate, they can be potentially very dangerous thinkers indeed in free societies - if they remain unchallenged.  If the world of Gardner is ever captured by the world of Evola, many good and honourable people will be moths burnt in the flames - especially those attracted to the spirituality of faux-tradition only to be sucked into the politics of resistance to the modern world.  We must all consider ourselves on watch ...

Tags: new religions, religion
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: determined

Dr. Christina Oakley Harrington gave a crystal clear account of the magical grimoire at Treadwells last night, placing the texts very firmly within the Judaeo-Christian culture of the late medieval and early modern period.  Amongst its many other intriguing threads, Treadwells is becoming the place to get an intelligent person's guide to the cultural history of the esoteric in a way that ought to be covered by the BBC.  A great deal of the value comes in the discussion immediately after the lecture where an unusual mix of academics, those practicing in the esoteric traditions and open-minded interested lay people raise questions in an environment where I have not yet heard a word spoken in anger or condemnation - even pedantry is worn lightly.  

As so often happens, I bought a book - four in fact - to create a small section in my library on Chaos Magic.  Since virtually every other intellectual trend of the last few thousand years has its representation, why not Chaos Magic?  My thanks to George for advising on the order in which they should be read.  The respectability of the study of esoteric religious experience is now well established.  The University of Exeter has a Special Centre under Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke - http://www.huss.ex.ac.uk/research/exeseso/index.htm - and, since 2005, there has been a pan-European learned society, based in the Netherlands, devoted to the subject - http://www.esswe.org/ .

***********

Now to the other side of the religious spectrum, the bit that decisively rejected the happy incoherencies of the magical and the Catholic for purity.  Social networking sites are really quite remarkable.  One old friend from thirty years ago with an interest in reformation history turns up at the beginning of the week and then I reconnect with Dr. Jeremy Ive, a pastor and academic in Kent, through Facebook.  Two links to the Reformation (and I a catholic-origin existentialist with strong neo-pagan leanings) in one week means that someone is working in mysterious ways.

More seriously, although I cannot believe what Jeremy believes, his private blog at http://jgaive.wordpress.com/ is a very clear exposition of what Reformed Theology actually means to those who have this view and is an interesting resource which I very much recommend.  The only time that I ever see my Wiccan friends get angry and even intolerant (and you know how easy-going most neo-pagans are: there has to be a word beyond 'laid-back' for their attitude) is when the Christian Church comes up and not always without cause.  In fact, I hope I have a broader view, distinguishing the community-institutional (which can have the same social effects as any illiberal imposition of one faith on another as the Christian communities of the Middle East are now finding) and the religious-spiritual.  Do not think that neo-pagans in power could not be equally oppressive and cruel ...

The essence of Jeremy's world seems to me to be centred on one 'mysterium tremendum', the sacrificial act of Jesus Christ, and this 'mysterium tremendum' is the leap of faith of which Kierkegaard spoke - meaningless unless taken at full tilt and without questioning.  This is so powerful a human commitment that it reveals and it blinds at the same time.  In a sense, it is magnificent.  Its very shattering and shifting of perception in conversion is probably more comprehensible to the 'magical' personality than it can be to the modern 'psychological' personality (as described by Christina last night).  The difference, of course, is that for the Christian it is a life change for all time whereas for the Pagan changing oneself is generally a constant process of fluidity and change centred on moments of perceptual revolution, some more important than others, that can move a person on in many stages as life progresses 'from maiden to crone'.  There are lots of "Ah, now I see" moments for the seeking mind.

This difference also represents (for me) a contrast, at the extremes, between the universalist (with his or her propensity for the authoritarian solution and order) and the existentialist (with his or her tendency to liminality and change, possibly anarchy).  I prefer freedom but I refuse to deny my respect for those whose leaps of faith re-construct the world in either way, whether permanently (though I find this limiting) or constantly  and progressively (with all its excitements and dangers) - with this proviso, derived from my liberal instincts, that all live by example and not by force or power.

Tags: new religions, religion
Current Location: London & Kent
Current Mood: calm

Today, as part of my research into the fascinating emergence of neo-paganism, I spent four or five hours at the Beltane Bash, a 'pagan pride' event that has been going for some ten or eleven years.  The actual parade was rained out but, in the rather rough and ready Conway Hall, 400-500 'ordinary' (whatever that may mean) people, old and young, enjoyed themselves in a family atmosphere, with stalls, music, dancing and dressing up.  But the most 'magical' moment was a human one - when the Master of Ceremonies gave his public blessing at the very beginning to his 21-year old daughter after her 'not-yet-convinced-by-paganism' boyfriend popped the question in the rain on the way to the festival.  The MC revealed that it was she who converted him and not the other way around.  

Looking on this and the opening ritual from the balcony, the thought occurred that the very earliest Christian communities in the Roman Empire probably operated at the same level of informality and lack of po-faced seriousness as these neo-pagans.  On the Pagan Forums (and the Americans can be so much more po-faced than the British), the issue of 'going mainstream' is often discussed.  The natural fear is that the 'new religions' (less than half a century old despite some claims of great antiquity) will become 'organised' and adopt the machinery and maybe the intolerances of the 'religions of the book'.  Something inoculates most neo-pagans against leadership and dogma.  Nearly every meeting will pointedly refer to respecting 'all the different traditions', but clearly people are wary of growth.  As a sign of that growth and the controversy it engenders, see today's Scotsman - http://www.topix.com/religion/pagan-wiccan/2007/05/all-hell-breaks-out-as-pagans-given-go-ahead-for-university-gathering   

Personally, I am coming to the end of my cycle of interest in neo-paganism as a cultural phenomenon.  I leave that interest with a considerable liking and respect for these people.  But this certainly does not mean the end of my interest in the more intellectual and philosophical aspects of the movement. On the contrary, with the revolution in the collective mind emerging out of Web 2.0 and the associated search for a more humanly grounded existential ideology  to stand against the 'machine' (the best term for a system that seems to run without regard for its components), there is much to learn from merging core neo-pagan ideas and, say, existentialism and the new cognitive sciences in a new synthesis.  

Such a synthesis may not satisfy essentialist believers in a benign Nature (the 'common faith' of many neo-pagans) nor the solipsistic individualists who represent the mainstream in what passes for liberal intellectual culture in the West.  On the other hand, it might help bridge the world of popular resistance to a failed elite with the current intellectual exploration of the limits of reason that is taking place far away from the somewhat dim intelligentsiya currently to be found in the media and think tank community.  Perhaps this will lead to a way of seeing that helps us exist better as co-operating individuals, instead of cogs in a machine that is out of our personal and collective control - or as mere 'economic men',anxiously treading water until we die.  We'll see ... but I'll not write for two or three days just to let the thoughts lie on the record for a while!

Tags: new religions
Current Location: London & Kent
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Soundtrack from the Wicker Man (in-joke)