Occulture, page 1
For Vanessa
Occulture
“Occulture is one of today’s most learned, unexpected, and illuminating tours through occult cultural influences. Carl Abrahamsson will expand your doors of perception of what the counterculture really is. His chapter on Anton LaVey came to me as a revelation. I am filled with hope that a book like this can be published at a time like ours.”
MITCH HOROWITZ, PEN AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF OCCULT AMERICA AND ONE SIMPLE IDEA
“Occulture is a word that was inevitable. During the hyperactive phase of Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth in the 1980s we were casting around for an all-embracing term to describe an approach to combining a unique, demystified, spiritual philosophy with a fervent insistence that all life and art are indivisible. At any given moment our sensory environment is whispering to us, telling us hidden stories, revealing subliminal connections. This concealed dialogue between every level of popular cultural forms and magical conclusions is what we named ‘occulture.’ Carl Abrahamsson takes this rendering of an innate cultural dynamic and exposes a multitude of parallel creative Universes that do that thing. So easy to perceive with hindsight but so invisible to the closed mind, he changes our means of perception—turning a straight line into an intricate spider’s web of possibilities and impossibilities combined. He performs magick; he concretizes meaning and brings forth revelation into his carefully focused vision.”
GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE, ENGLISH SINGER-SONGWRITER, MUSICIAN, AND POET
“These days, too much occult discourse comes off as grandiose, needlessly arcane, or desperately darker-than-thou. But decades of participant observation on the art-magic-transgression beat have given Carl Abrahamsson a more down-to-earth approach. Streamlining Crowley, LaVey, and postpunk chaos magic, these talks and essays offer up accessible, pragmatic, and psychologically savvy takes on the intuitive potentials of creative individuation. This is not another ‘system’ but sparkplugs engineered for your own magical engine.”
ERIK DAVIS, AUTHOR OF NOMAD CODES: ADVENTURES IN MODERN ESOTERICA AND HOST OF EXPANDING MIND PODCAST
“A sharp, frank, and level-headed exploration of some of the most important figures and movements on the current edges of occultism. Highly recommended.”
RICHARD SMOLEY, AUTHOR OF FORBIDDEN FAITH: THE SECRET HISTORY OF GNOSTICISM
“Carl Abrahamson’s Occulture is itself a beautiful example of the phenomena it discusses. Erudite and a pleasure to read, the collected essays have the potential to nudge consciousness beyond the ordinary perspective of culture and history. A necessary read for students of culture or magick.”
PHILIP H. FARBER, AUTHOR OF BRAIN MAGICK, META-MAGICK, AND FUTURERITUAL
“Carl Abrahamsson—that curator and champion of everything in occulture that is cool, edgy, trendy, and artsy—inspires us with this mind-expanding collection of essays: meditations on art, magick, sex, psyche, and society that collectively trace the supernatural’s proclivity to cross over from counterculture to mainstream, casting light on how we see and understand our world. Not to be missed!”
RICHARD KACZYNSKI, AUTHOR OF PERDURABO: THE LIFE OF ALEISTER CROWLEY
“Through this collection of articles, essays, talks, and miscellanea, Carl Abrahamsson emerges as a dedicated communicator who shares concepts, histories, and ideas with insight and imagination. Whether exploring the culture of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth or the philosophies of Crowley, Steiner, Jung, and Paul Bowles, Abrahamsson’s work is never less than engaging.”
JACK SARGEANT, AUTHOR OF FLESH AND EXCESS: ON UNDERGROUND FILM, NAKED LENS: BEAT CINEMA, AND AGAINST CONTROL
“A welcome collection of insightful essays on the acculturation of society from the veteran chronicler of countercultures.”
HYMENAEUS BETA, FRATER SUPERIOR OF O.T.O., MUSICIAN, AND OCCULTIST
Acknowledgments
Warm thanks for supporting my work are due Margareta Abrahamsson, Sofia Lindström-Abrahamsson, Jon Graham, everyone at Inner Traditions, Peder Byberg, Jack Stevenson, Lea Porsager, Bjarne Salling Pedersen, Peter Steffensen, Pam Grossman, Jesse Bransford, William Koch, Morbid Anatomy, Michael Moynihan and Annabel Lee Moynihan, Andrew M. McKenzie, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Gabriel McCaughry, Thomas Tibert, Alkistis Dimech, Peter Grey, Thorsten Soma, Jonas Plöger, Claus Laufenburg, Susanne Witzgall, Kerstin Stakemeier, Dariusz Misiuna, Katarzyna Drenda, Helena Malewska, Bartosz Samitowski, Krzysztof Azarewicz, Ania Orzech, Vera & Stojan Nikolich, Marko Štefan-Poljak, Andreas Kalliaridis, Fredrik Söderberg, Ida Månson, Elisabeth Punzi, Torben Hansen, Rasmus Hungnes, and Martin Palmer. Extra special thanks are due Vanessa Sinclair, to whom this book is lovingly dedicated.
Contents
Cover Image
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Gary Lachman
Chapter 1. Contra Contra Means Pro
Chapter 2. Splendor Solis
Chapter 3. Abstraction Made Concrete
Chapter 4. Over the Moon and Back Again
Chapter 5. Pokémon Go Away
Chapter 6. What Remains for the Future?
Chapter 7. Paul Bowles: Expat Magic
Chapter 8. Tangible Evanescence
Chapter 9. Anton LaVey, Magical Innovator INTEGRATION OF THE EGO
THE VALIDATION AND INTEGRATION OF EMOTION
A SENSE OF HUMOR
ARTIFICIAL HUMAN COMPANIONS
THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT
INTEGRATION OF MUSIC
THE VILLAIN
THE THIRD SIDE
Chapter 10. Carl Jung, Mythmaker
Chapter 11. The Imaginative Libido
Chapter 12. Formulating the Desired
Chapter 13. Zine und Zeit
Chapter 14. The Mega Golem Is Alive and Well
Chapter 15. Sexual-Dynamic Polarity as a Magical Formula
Chapter 16. The Economy of Magic
Chapter 17. The Magic of Dreams Made Real
Chapter 18. Collective Mysticism
Chapter 19. Challenging Inertia and Entropy
Chapter 20. Memes or Schemes
Chapter 21. Intuition as a State of Grace
Footnotes
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company
Books of Related Interest
Copyright & Permissions
Index
Foreword
CARL ABRAHAMSSON, the author of the lively, engaging, and occasionally quirky writings you now hold in your hand, calls himself a “subcultural entrepreneur” whose main interest is in the strange interzone between creativity and ritual, the liminal space blending magic and art that has come to be known as occulture. What is occulture? The term is said to have been coined by the performance artist Genesis P-Orridge sometime in the 1980s and is easily recognizable as a portmanteau word combing “occult” and “culture.” Abrahamsson agrees. It is a general term, he tells us, “for anything cultural but decidedly occult/spiritual.”
Needless to say that covers a lot of ground. In recent years the powerful and informative links between art and the occult have become a hot topic both with artists and occultists, but anyone with some knowledge of the history of both recognizes that the association between the two predates their current popularity by some time. Hermetic ideas informed the Renaissance, and the Symbolism of the nineteenth century was rife with notions of other worlds and intimations of strange, ethereal realities. The occult interests of the Surrealists are well known, but even before them the Russian esoteric philosopher P. D. Ouspensky was inspiring Cubo-Futurist and Suprematist painters with remarks like, “In art it is necessary to study ‘occultism’; the artist must be clairvoyant; he must see that which others do not see; he must be a magician.”
Yet although it has a fine pedigree reaching back perhaps into the roots of art and self-consciousness itself—the earliest known paintings, dating back some fifty thousand years, were made by our prehistoric ancestors in nearly inaccessible caves while experiencing altered states of consciousness and journeying in the spirit world—occulture is something more than an awareness that magic and art are strongly connected, notwithstanding the importance of this awareness. There is a purposive element behind the idea, a self-consciousness associated with earlier art movements, a need to define itself against the backdrop of the ever-increasing plethora of information, entertainment, and distraction that characterizes our time. Yet while many, if not most, art movements define themselves by exclusion, cutting out and rejecting everything not them—André Breton’s banishments from the Surrealist fold are legendary—occulture works with a broader brush, embracing a wide and at times contradictory assemblage of influences and interests. In this it shares much with a movement within modern occultism with which it is often associated: chaos magick. As I understand it, in chaos magick, one need not stick to the prescribed rituals or pantheons but can make magick with just about anything, provided one’s imagination is strong and one’s will is in earnest. How different is this from many forms of art since Duchamp, when the touch of the artist transforms everyday items—even urinals—into mysterious portals of wonder?
The wide lens of occulture is in evidence in this brilliant collection of lectures, essays, and articles aimed, in one way or another, at conveying the peculiar aesthetic shared by its varied subjects. Where artists may have once turned up their noses at trashy occult rubbish, and occultists peered confusedly at some incomprehensible conceptual work, the o
What strikes a reader of these short, sharp forays into the occultural landscape is precisely this breadth of interest and curiosity. I get the feeling from them that their author is determined to find something fascinating in everything, to be able to, like the magician or artist, turn what we might look away from into the center of our attention. Having worked in many of the fields he writes about—producing music, film, fiction, and photography (he is a kind of Renaissance occulturist)—Abrahamsson is well equipped for his expeditions; the reader is in the hands of a good guide through a cultural terrain that is not without its pitfalls. Some of the pieces here focus tightly on magical practice, mostly of the Thelemic, that is, Crowleyan, variety, and some readers may need a bit of background in this in order to get their full import. But the main ideas are clear and seem to fit in nicely with studies of dolls, dreams, magick as a kind of “currency”—an occult Bitcoin—and the philosophy of Anton LaVey. A piece on the similarities and differences between Aleister Crowley and Rudolf Steiner draws some surprising comparisons, and one on Jung, mythology, and their appearance in contemporary culture adds some new insights to an often too-familiar theme.
My own favorites were the pieces on Paul Bowles, Ernst Jünger, and Yukio Mishima, three writers who we would not immediately consider occult, but that occulture’s wide lens can easily fit into its frame. The idea of the “expat occultist,” a magician constantly on the move, as it were—as Bowles seemed to have been—seems obvious, but I don’t think anyone pointed it out as such before; at least I haven’t seen it. Jünger and Mishima seem natural for a comparison. Both, in different ways, had a fascination with combat and battle; Jünger, of course, was a decorated war hero, while Mishima was too young to see combat, a serious failing from his point of view that troubled him throughout his short life. Both developed fastidious, highly polished prose styles. And both were, again in different ways, on the right side of the political spectrum, although Jünger’s contemplative detachment is a rather different affair from Mishima’s histrionic and fatal acting out.
What is important here is that Abrahamsson is taking occulture down interesting new routes, beyond the pentagrams and black leather that too often obscure its more subtle offerings and provide the uninitiated with kitschy reasons to dismiss it. He is showing that the occulturist perspective can provide new ways in which to see literature and even the act of writing itself. But what these writings do fundamentally is what all good criticism should: convey the passion and delight that the critic found in his subjects, so that the reader can share in this transformative bounty. This collection, I think, manages that admirably.
GARY LACHMAN, LONDON, NOVEMBER 2016
GARY LACHMAN is the author of twenty books on the links between consciousness, culture, and the Western inner tradition, most recently The Lost Knowledge of the Imagination, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, and The Secret Teachers of the Western World. He writes for different journals in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe, where he also lectures, and his work has been translated into several languages. He is on the adjunct faculty in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. In a former life he was a member of the pop group Blondie and in 2006 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Born in New Jersey, since 1996 he has lived in London. His website is garylachman.co.uk.
1
Contra Contra Means Pro
Originally a lecture delivered at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, Germany, 2015.
THE RECENT INFLUX, both in substance and attention, of magical thinking, esotericism, and spirituality in a more visible contemporary cultural context has already been well documented. This interdisciplinary lecture series*1 is just one example of an emergence of topics and areas that used to be banned or shunned. Why is this? I’m going to take a look at some possible explanations and shine the light on some current examples of magic, not only as a fascinating and exotic topic but as an active ingredient in contemporary cultural change.
There are so many possible definitions that I think we’ll have to begin by narrowing down. Many things, developments, and changes begin in the dark, so to speak, whether it’s cultural, political, business related, or interest-group related—and especially if these contain seeds or ideas that go against the current status quo. So one treads lightly, evaluates, discusses with the already initiated, and develops the change in question. That seems to be a more or less general modus operandi. We are going to stick to considerably more esoteric or occult ideas and methods this evening, meaning ideas contained within frameworks that have traditionally been outside normal or accepted scientific or philosophical discourse and methodology.
It’s complicated to look at a topic that has been so integrated in human cultural history but retrospectively mainly through fiction and myth. The reason for the vague cloudiness has usually been a mix of internal and external pressure. Esoteric groups or solitary magicians have kept teachings and techniques secret to retain an intragroup dynamic, to “protect” the teachings in question. But they have also done it because of external pressure; because it has simply been dangerous to display interest or activity within repressive cultures. Complicated codes, symbols, and initiatory structures have thereby become both fascinating and terrifying to the outsiders, who have usually been the ones to confusedly codify what they’ve only heard about.
One could say that the Knights Templar represented an occult counterculture. This order of military men and noblemen, active from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, initially supported the Catholic Church by helping pilgrims reach the Holy Land. But as they grew wealthier and also trafficked with the enemy, meaning Islam, in terms of hidden knowledge and science, the polarity increased. The Catholic Church refused competition when it came to worldly power, and this increasingly powerful group that concocted secret rituals based on enemy sources had to go. To hell, that is. After a Catholic clean sweep, complete with human sacrifice at the stake, the Templars went underground along with their mysteries, only to resurface some four hundred years later as Freemasons—according to their own myth, at least. Here we can see a continued countercultural streak, in that the Freemasonic republic of the United States disconnected from the strict Anglo-Saxon Church of England hegemony.
Strange things were going on in Germany too. The mythical Bavarian Illuminati and Rosicrucianism challenged hegemonic structures from the seventeenth century and onward, mythically empowered by occult Eastern sources and carrying an individualistic impulse that was not looked upon kindly by either church or state. There was always something going on beneath the surface but most often it was based on small secret groups interested in self-development, radical science, hedonism, or simply liberty as a principle. Some individuals from this para-occult background drifted into political movements, but many did not.
The postrevolutionary Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century stressed rationalism and empiricism, and also brought with it a slightly more liberal atmosphere. And the pendulum kept on swinging. When industrialism, the inevitable child of the Enlightenment, hit hard during the nineteenth century, the irrational yearning of Pre-Raphaelites and symbolists brought forth a bourgeois interest in altered states of consciousness, spiritualism, and Eastern philosophies. But still it was contained as specialized interests, with no real tangibility or credibility in the main cultural stream.
