Hi. Mage here. Practicing for about 35 years. Love most of your work, and like a lot of Thelemites I’m a big Blake fan, but one quibble on a point of occulture fact: chaotes don’t usually care very much about the “collapse of the west” or any other political agenda unless that is the paradigm they are “playing” in at the moment. As far as I have ever been able to tell, chaotes as a tradition don’t really care about much except the “free play of belief” and usually very basic practical magick (sigils, servitors, stuff like that). They do have a form of mysticism classified as “yellow magic” by Pete Carroll back in the day, but it’s usually just a mix of psychodynamic and cognitive psychology dressed up in sigils and Austin Osman Spare rhetoric about “atavisms” and the like. Pete Carrol once said that when he heard the word “mysticism” it made him want to “reach for a loaded wand” (and there was much oohing and ahing over how edgy that was at the time…it was the 90s, after all).
I think you might have chaotes confused with Discordians, who did have a whole “immanentize the eschaton” trip, especially back when Robert Anton Wilson was still alive and writing, but they don’t really exist anymore as an active tradition (partially because the whole notion of “Operation Mindfuck” has been generally recognized as deeply unethical).
There are connections between the traditions and communities, but their approaches are usually very different. Chaotes usually consider themselves to be Very Scientific (two of the biggest early chaos magick authors were Pete Carrol, whose background is in physics, and Phil Hine, whose background is in psychology), while Discordians are (were) just as likely to sneer at science as use it in their metaphysical theories.
Now, in a sense both have a common root in that they are epistemological nihilists, hence the whole “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” schtick. But only Discordians operationalized that through Operation Mindfuck as a form of psychic terrorism. Your average chaote can be anywhere on the political spectrum, but almost all people who tend to identify as Discordians are some variety of anarchist.
I've noticed some of the perveyors of "deindustrialized fiction," seem to be very attached to their viewpoints of either an apocalypse or a slow winding down of industrial civilization, in a very left brained manor.
I’ve not, though have read Kingsley’s earlier work. He was great when I was working on Plato, for his academic investigation of magic in Ancient Greece, though I can’t follow him with his conviction that Plato lies at the root of all subsequent troubles.
The modern world is haunted by two specters: the specter of collapse, and the specter of its own making. We have convinced ourselves that reality is either a machine to be mastered or a chaos to be feared… never a living mystery to be entered.
Mark, I really appreciate how this piece traces and reveals the poverty of our imagination. Not that we dream too wildly, but that we dream too small. We have traded the sacred fire of divine participation for the cheap pyrotechnics of willpower and wish-fulfillment.
Blake saw what we have forgotten, that the imagination is not a tool for shaping the world to our desires, but a faculty for perceiving the world as it truly is… shot through with the presence of God. The New Thought evangelists, the chaos magicians, the prophets of apocalypse… all are trapped in the same error. They believe that by force of will, by sheer intensity of belief, they can bend reality to their whims. But this is not mysticism, it is megalomania. The true mystic knows that the imagination’s highest purpose is not to create, but to receive… to become porous to the divine life that pulses beneath the surface of things.
We live in an age that has lost the distinction between magic and sacrament. Magic seeks to control, sacrament seeks to surrender. The chaos magician invokes forces he does not understand to reshape a world he despises. The mystic kneels before a mystery he cannot comprehend and finds himself reshaped. One grasps at power, the other is grasped by love.
Blake’s genius was to see that the “real and eternal world” is not some distant heaven, but the very ground of our being, the living web of divine energy that sustains all things. To awaken to this reality is not to escape the chaos of history, but to see it transfigured. The apocalypse is not coming, it is already here, hidden in plain sight, in every act of love, every moment of attention, every glimpse of beauty that pulls us out of ourselves and into the divine life.
The way forward is not more control, but more wonder. Not louder incantations, but deeper silence. Not the end of the world, but the recovery of its sacredness.
Lovely reflections! As regards this portion “There is no Love calling you through your desire to live; there is only the threat of loss,” it summons to mind the quote from Simulacrum and Simulation “Like Orpheus, it always turns around too soon, and, like Eurydice, its object falls back into Hades” (p. 7) in bringing into analogical conjunction the similar tragedies befalling “scientific objects” and the objects of "idolatry" vis-à-vis untempered notions of innocence or immortality. Metaphysically, or theologically speaking, one might also call to mind the fitting distinction between cataphatic and apophatic approaches and the dualisms undermining each (at least from Blake’s perspective). The third way between Swann’s and Guermantes’ way? I wonder to what extent you might agree or diverge on the proposition that deep pragmatism (in the Deweyan or Peircean fashion — Dewey is constantly calling or being called by the “eternal” if one parses the texts closely) and process ontology carry Blake’s “tradition” forth in certain ways?
Sorry to burst your self-hypnotic bubble Mark. But you really do need to begin noticing the way you subconsciously and synchronously stitch together reality-labelling words 'as-if' this is Reality. When it's simply the inventive power of Imitation and the auto-suggestion power of memory. Repent and confess your sin of Conscious Unawareness. The truth that you have no idea, 'how' you actually do Being You. You just 'instinctively' perform the quintessential behaviours of walking and talking without awareness of what it is inside you that facilitates this Subconsciously Synchronous Behaviour. Not simply your Brain but the entirety of your Evolved Nervous System. Wake Up Mark, please 🙏
On the connection between Trump and Positive Thinking, John Oliver said: “He’s like if the Secret actually got into the wrong hands!”
Hi. Mage here. Practicing for about 35 years. Love most of your work, and like a lot of Thelemites I’m a big Blake fan, but one quibble on a point of occulture fact: chaotes don’t usually care very much about the “collapse of the west” or any other political agenda unless that is the paradigm they are “playing” in at the moment. As far as I have ever been able to tell, chaotes as a tradition don’t really care about much except the “free play of belief” and usually very basic practical magick (sigils, servitors, stuff like that). They do have a form of mysticism classified as “yellow magic” by Pete Carroll back in the day, but it’s usually just a mix of psychodynamic and cognitive psychology dressed up in sigils and Austin Osman Spare rhetoric about “atavisms” and the like. Pete Carrol once said that when he heard the word “mysticism” it made him want to “reach for a loaded wand” (and there was much oohing and ahing over how edgy that was at the time…it was the 90s, after all).
I think you might have chaotes confused with Discordians, who did have a whole “immanentize the eschaton” trip, especially back when Robert Anton Wilson was still alive and writing, but they don’t really exist anymore as an active tradition (partially because the whole notion of “Operation Mindfuck” has been generally recognized as deeply unethical).
There are connections between the traditions and communities, but their approaches are usually very different. Chaotes usually consider themselves to be Very Scientific (two of the biggest early chaos magick authors were Pete Carrol, whose background is in physics, and Phil Hine, whose background is in psychology), while Discordians are (were) just as likely to sneer at science as use it in their metaphysical theories.
Now, in a sense both have a common root in that they are epistemological nihilists, hence the whole “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” schtick. But only Discordians operationalized that through Operation Mindfuck as a form of psychic terrorism. Your average chaote can be anywhere on the political spectrum, but almost all people who tend to identify as Discordians are some variety of anarchist.
Thanks and yes, I should have nuanced the differences.
I've noticed some of the perveyors of "deindustrialized fiction," seem to be very attached to their viewpoints of either an apocalypse or a slow winding down of industrial civilization, in a very left brained manor.
Amen!
Have you read Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque? Blake lurks in every margin…
I’ve not, though have read Kingsley’s earlier work. He was great when I was working on Plato, for his academic investigation of magic in Ancient Greece, though I can’t follow him with his conviction that Plato lies at the root of all subsequent troubles.
The modern world is haunted by two specters: the specter of collapse, and the specter of its own making. We have convinced ourselves that reality is either a machine to be mastered or a chaos to be feared… never a living mystery to be entered.
Mark, I really appreciate how this piece traces and reveals the poverty of our imagination. Not that we dream too wildly, but that we dream too small. We have traded the sacred fire of divine participation for the cheap pyrotechnics of willpower and wish-fulfillment.
Blake saw what we have forgotten, that the imagination is not a tool for shaping the world to our desires, but a faculty for perceiving the world as it truly is… shot through with the presence of God. The New Thought evangelists, the chaos magicians, the prophets of apocalypse… all are trapped in the same error. They believe that by force of will, by sheer intensity of belief, they can bend reality to their whims. But this is not mysticism, it is megalomania. The true mystic knows that the imagination’s highest purpose is not to create, but to receive… to become porous to the divine life that pulses beneath the surface of things.
We live in an age that has lost the distinction between magic and sacrament. Magic seeks to control, sacrament seeks to surrender. The chaos magician invokes forces he does not understand to reshape a world he despises. The mystic kneels before a mystery he cannot comprehend and finds himself reshaped. One grasps at power, the other is grasped by love.
Blake’s genius was to see that the “real and eternal world” is not some distant heaven, but the very ground of our being, the living web of divine energy that sustains all things. To awaken to this reality is not to escape the chaos of history, but to see it transfigured. The apocalypse is not coming, it is already here, hidden in plain sight, in every act of love, every moment of attention, every glimpse of beauty that pulls us out of ourselves and into the divine life.
The way forward is not more control, but more wonder. Not louder incantations, but deeper silence. Not the end of the world, but the recovery of its sacredness.
Lovely reflections! As regards this portion “There is no Love calling you through your desire to live; there is only the threat of loss,” it summons to mind the quote from Simulacrum and Simulation “Like Orpheus, it always turns around too soon, and, like Eurydice, its object falls back into Hades” (p. 7) in bringing into analogical conjunction the similar tragedies befalling “scientific objects” and the objects of "idolatry" vis-à-vis untempered notions of innocence or immortality. Metaphysically, or theologically speaking, one might also call to mind the fitting distinction between cataphatic and apophatic approaches and the dualisms undermining each (at least from Blake’s perspective). The third way between Swann’s and Guermantes’ way? I wonder to what extent you might agree or diverge on the proposition that deep pragmatism (in the Deweyan or Peircean fashion — Dewey is constantly calling or being called by the “eternal” if one parses the texts closely) and process ontology carry Blake’s “tradition” forth in certain ways?
Sorry to burst your self-hypnotic bubble Mark. But you really do need to begin noticing the way you subconsciously and synchronously stitch together reality-labelling words 'as-if' this is Reality. When it's simply the inventive power of Imitation and the auto-suggestion power of memory. Repent and confess your sin of Conscious Unawareness. The truth that you have no idea, 'how' you actually do Being You. You just 'instinctively' perform the quintessential behaviours of walking and talking without awareness of what it is inside you that facilitates this Subconsciously Synchronous Behaviour. Not simply your Brain but the entirety of your Evolved Nervous System. Wake Up Mark, please 🙏