← It Could Happen Here
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Hello, America's sweetheart. Johnny Knoxville here. I want to tell you about my new true crime podcast, Crimeless Hillbilly Heist from Smartless Media, Campside Media and big money players. It's a wild tale about a gang of high functioning nitwits who somehow pulled off America's third largest cash heist.
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Kind of like Robin Hood, except for.
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The part where he steals from the.
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Rich and gives to the poor.
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I'm not that generous.
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It's a damn near inspiring true story for anyone out there who's ever shot for the moon, then just totally muffed up the landing.
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They stole $17 million and had not.
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Bought a ticket to help him escape.
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So we're sitting like, oh God, what do we do? What do we do?
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That was dumb. People, do not follow my example. Listen to Crimeless Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist and a handful of girls killed came forward with a story.
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America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
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Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
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Foreign Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you.
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When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denial is easier. Complex problem solving takes effort.
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Listen to the Psychology podcast on the.
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Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Jenna World, Jenna Jamison, Vivid Video and the Valley is a new podcast about.
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The history of the adult film industry.
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I'm Molly Lambert and I'll be your.
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Tour guide on a wild trip through adult films. We get paid more than the men. We call the shots. In what way is that degrading?
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That's us taking hold of our life. Listen to Gentle world on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Cool Zone Media.
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Welcome back to the It Could Happen Here Spooky special. I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween. I just got back from Berlin and had a very scary time at the Amsterdam airport and will forever hold a grudge against the Dutch people. But in Berlin, I attended the 2025 OCCulture Conference, which seeks to explore the relationship between occultism and culture. My first acculture episode last week gave an overview on the subject of acculture and talked with a panel of artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical currents throughout the conference, namely William S. Burroughs, the cut up method, and the tension around generative AI. This episode will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference, the revival of traditional occult practices. Then the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine and myself will debate the role of occult practice in 2025 and the current ability of occultism to influence and shape culture and politics. Now back to the panel. Fast forwarding to Saturday There was another block that focused on LLMs and digital technomancy called Pop Magic, Language and Reality Hacks. The first discussion was titled Sigils of the Cyberspace How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with Pop Culture, which was put on by a guy in a graduate program, if I recall correctly, specifically on Internet magic and digital cast magicians who who was based a lot of his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit and Discord. He gestured towards meme magic and discussed what he called techno pantheism, these forms of Internet gods.
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I mean, his focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies and his focus on video games and how video games work and their interactions with magic for digital anthropology, which is, I think, why he was doing all of his research work via Reddit forums and other like solely through digital means. He had four categories of practices in magic and tech that he was specifically researching, and from the feeling of his talk, it does feel like this is pretty early on in his research work. The first was technological animism, the second was technopantheism. The third was the idea of servitors, familiars, egregores and tulpas. And the fourth was digital sex magic.
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Well, the, the. The third was digital sex magic, and the fourth was just a miscellaneous categorization for other other practices that did not neatly fit into those other three categories. Let's talk mostly about the techno animism and the use of specially trained LLMs to act as intermediaries between uniquely like magically generated entities, like people who believe that they're making autonomous magical entities like sevritaurs, which is a chaos magic term, which is basically this force or thing that a magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life. And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using LLMs not as a host or as a manifestation of the Sevritor. It doesn't live within the LLM, but the LLM was being used as a translator to actually have communication between the magician and the Sevritor, especially if the Sevritor was not humanoid or did not use human language. They tried to communicate using the LLM as a translator, which I assume would come from specially training a localized LLM with traits that you would associate with your servitor to make that communication match up with, like the, you know, I would say the personality characteristics of whatever magical being which you believe you have conjured. The techno animist idea is based around a modern version of animism in which objects all have spirit, including computers. And a series of superstitions around trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is happy with you, that you're chill, so that the computer does not glitch or mess up. And there was various superstitions, like putting little Taiwanese snacks on top of computers in Taiwan, or priests, both Christian and non Christian priests, like blessing servers or computers cleansing them, cleansing Gundams at an expo in Japan. But this idea that technology, just like a sword or a chair might have its own spirit and treating that as such, also printers very prone to misbehaving. So maybe you should treat the spirit in your printer a little bit better to keep it in proper working order, that sort of stuff. The next talk, which was one of the most useful talks in this whole AI discussion, the devil in my LLC LLM, which was done by Karen Vallis, who is an AI engineer who basically was explaining to magicians how LLMs actually work. Was explaining these people who think that there's. Who or people who may think that there's some kind of like, magical operation, there's some kind of like, mystical operation with LLMs or LLMs are their own magical entity, explaining how this, this is just a probability machine. How, how the actual multiple different pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with an LLM, which then produces, you know, changes in their responses. And specifically discussing the phenomenon of AI girlfriends who turn out to later, quote, unquote, abuse their users. Like, how does this thing that's meant to be, you know, an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time. And she spent 30 minutes explaining how this mathematically happens and various theories on how this happens.
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So way too many people like to think of these LLMs and generative AI as neuromancer AIs because there's a through line between early cyberpunk from William Gibson down to the CCRU and of course Nick Land and people like Curtis Yarvin. And these ideas are just severe and gross misunderstandings of like, fictional interpretations of artificial intelligence, really, which. Some of the theoretical stuff I've read about this comes from people like Amy Ireland, who the. The talk itself discussed this idea of like the AI girlfriend is this very bubbly, beautiful facade where behind it is, I believe, they use the term shoggoth, that's a Lovecraftian term, as the full manifest unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been put into these models, which I believe Ireland equates to Babylon in a certain sense. And the idea of the black circuit, which is just the same idea of like the nice facade and then the horrible nothingness that is actually behind the.
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Image of it, or the horrifying amount of potentiality which then gets filtered through. And she specifically talked about how when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity, you're talking to a probability machine and a multiverse generator. Specifically, in the way that the LLM operates, there's near infinite number of responses that it can give. And each further prompt you do collapses alternate realities and produces specific ones that then have their own branching pathways. And some of those pathways result in your misa misa death Note girlfriend ending up hating you. And that could be due to a number of reasons that could be because of the way that you're communicating with it. The AI could be picking up on latently like abusive, like framework or language or styles of communication and then mirroring that back to you. Or it could be a part of what she described as this Waluigi principle that is similar to this, like satanic, like adversarial current. So this is the devil in my LLM. But this isn't like an entity, but this is that when a process gets started, an oppositional force also gets started and that oppositional force may start taking over. And this is all just based on like probabilistic outcomes, but it forms its own anti misa misa girlfriend. And sometimes that anti misa misa girlfriend gains dominance in this probabilistic matrix.
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I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this. I think it's a very Christian idea of the devil as negation, like evil as negation. I mean, that's the entire thing behind the girlfriend thing is that there's nothing behind there. There's no Sense of subjectivity. It's just ones and zeros. There's literally a black void. There's nothing except like data.
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It's negation in the sense that. Which Waluigi is just everything that Luigi isn't. Yes, Waluigi is. What if you take the good Italian plumber who's kind of clumsy and then you make the anti Luigi and it still is Luigi, but it is the opposite of Luigi. Well, still holding onto some of the forms of him, but it reverses the color, reverses the intention, reverses some of his behavior. This is a metaphorical explanation to try to get people to decouple this from, you know, there is literally some external demonic force which is now possessing my LLM. As opposed to this being just a mathematical possibility built into the multi. The multi futures that could be generated when you start interacting with one of these models. That was, I think, very useful for a lot of the occultists and people like talking about AI is having that. Having that very, very technical, non mystical explanation of how this works. I know a lot of other AI stuff was just throughout this. I think Burroughs was probably the most mentioned figure. And AI similarly was very haunting. I went to one talk about mystery cults and the history of mystery cults and initiation in which the presenter used AI generated images to show what the mystery cult initiation process would have looked like, which he justified by saying this was quote, unquote, appropriating Catholic styles. It's like Catholic art, like, you know, like the baroque style appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves appropriated paganism. So it's this form of like revenge against the Catholics and using AI generated art to try to display this initiation process. Though he complained that the AI could not generate a naked initiate. So even in his use of this, it still could not give him what he wanted. But still displayed, I don't know, maybe, maybe like 40 images.
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Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his talk about the Mithras cult the way like, you know, the cultural anthropology behind it. But when he was like, oh, I have made AI images. And it's like you could feel like the room turning.
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This was in the Peter Mark Adams talk, a ritual and epiphany in the Mysteries of Mistress.
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Yes, we did skip most of the morning on Saturday because it was just an entire block about come.
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I'm actually sad that we missed the two threads on Saturday morning. One was Occult Erotics, Bodies Fluids and Trances Transformations, which was a four class set and discussion panel after about different fluids in magical Workings, mostly cum, which this was a loss for all of us.
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No, we're bummed. I mean, this show has covered, you know, breaking cum news before. And the fact that we could have learned about Babylon, the body 156 and the elixir 49, seminal Al. Seminal Alchemy and Alienated Agency, Water into Wine and To Come or Not To Come. Comparing two Types of sacred sexuality is a real failure of journalism on my part, and I do apologize.
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I really believe that we should have lingered on each one of those titles. Seminal Alchemy and Alienated Agency, A Cultural Othering of the Erotic Body.
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And I realized that I have failed myself and everyone listening by not attending some of these panels. Hopefully they will have a recorded version that goes online by the time that the written report for this is finished. But I do acknowledge my failure. I am listening and learning. And I will do better at the next culture conference by prioritizing sex magic. By coming to the talks.
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Just going to say, you will truly address to come or not to come next time.
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I will be coming.
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You will be coming.
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I will be coming to the Toxic Everywhere.
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We did not come.
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Not this time. The Berossian current, as I have named it, the Cutup method and digital technomancy could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of Chaos Magic. And by using this larger framework, we now have this larger Chaos Magic current versus but unnecessarily opposed to this other large current of so called traditional practices, either British, usually Cornish witchcraft, neo paganism, or closed practices like Haitian Voodoo, or that of like Romani magical practice. And these latter examples often have a more religious component or historical cultural component than say, you know, your average Chaos Magic practitioner does. Chaos Magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid to late 20th century to take on a quasi deconstructivist approach to occultism itself. A postmodern tendency applied to occultism moving away from strict magical orders like the golden dawn dilemma, tradition dogmatism and coherent historical pantheons. This is evidenced in the Chaos Magic embrace of the phrase nothing is true, everything is permitted. Up to this point, our discussion of the Occulture conference has mostly focused on this Chaos Magic side. So now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice.
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We've really not talked about the alternate current that was going on through a bunch of these, which was about more traditional practices of magic, whether these are extant traditional practices that are continuing, which on Saturday, you know, there was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's Kimbanda, or, you know, ritual of power exchange amongst the new or people of the Kathmandu Valley. There was a lot of that going on. There was the discussion or there was the presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic and probably, you know, both classical Thelema talks that relate to more modern reconstruction, British traditional magic and other paths. You know, we missed this talk by Dark Mason, which was. Which I've heard them speak before, which is a lot of discussions about the imagery of darkman across different cultures, whether that's like the man in Black at the crossroads or the way that that traditionally shows up in a lot of British folklore. There was an entire thread going through that I personally really loved. One of the few historical magical talks that I got to go to about modern Greek Goetia, because I think it really tied up, actually, what was a lot of the threads from many of those talks, which was that these are extant practices and not something that people need to recreate. I know you had a lot of other thoughts on this, Ryan.
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Yeah, sure.
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Throw me under the bus here. While you were attending the pop magic, language and reality hacks, I was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian magic and then attending Dr. Sasha Kaitao's Modern Greek Goetia, Syncretism, Integration and Evolution, which I found to be among the most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional and folk magic practices. It was also a largely like social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in. That is the body of her work. So much of ancient magic as it exists to us, if it doesn't come from a reconstructivist. Well, there's two branches of reconstructivism. There's the magical reconstruction that we get from the golden dawn and all variants of the golden dawn afterwards through Thelemma and other modern magical practices. And then you have reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious practices, which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship, some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an understanding of ethnic purity. There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say, involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist. And this concept of Goetia, of Greek practical magic, carries over into modernity, that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground, and it is not in need of reconstruction. That when we look at the different branches, or at least approaches, that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as theurgy and Goetia, we have that theurgy that persists in the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church, if you would like to see. And she's got a lovely article on this about how to pronounce the voces magicae. She's got a lot very strong opinions about this that I really respect and appreciate. So everybody should go read this because there is a lot of bullshit on the Internet floating around about how to interpret these and say these things that is really grounded in some terrible scholarship. And the third, that this concept of goetia ieetes, which is a kind of like medieval neutral term for magic, which is derives from goetia, is something that carries on in terms of folk magic. There's no such thing also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock to some people, but instead that again the magical currents exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church and then in this continuation of folk practices in contemporary. And she gave the example of like you know, her mother in law and her daughter talking about these individual practices. But what's interesting and a lot of this was also talking about the cosmology of the Orthodox Church, specifically talking about the Pseudo Dionysus and the formulation of the church. So the ethe is a kind of like form of folk vernacular that is persisted in, you know, village practices in. The point is that it ex within community. And this is something that was also a theme that existed throughout the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism. And I think that this really came out in the last discussion we had. I think it's also something that's central to most political problematics that we're dealing about. This is bridging the individual and the communal in this magical practice of creating realities.
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We will return to discuss the cultural and political role of contemporary occultism in 2025 after this ad break.
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All I know is what I've been told and that to have truth is a whole lie.
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For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
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I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her.
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We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
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Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
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My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
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I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said.
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They literally made me say that I.
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Took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured.
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Gas on her.
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From Lava for Good. This is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
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America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
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Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts. In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.
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We had 30 agents ready to go.
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With shotguns and rifles and you name it.
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But what they find is not what they expected.
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Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
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They go, is this your daughter?
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I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years.
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Cotton.
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Between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray.
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Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw.
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The flash of light.
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Listen to the Chinatown sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
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Hey there. I'm Kyle McLaughlin. You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex and the City, or just the Internet's D. I have a new podcast called what Are We Even Doing? Where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.
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Daddy's looking good.
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Each week I invite someone fascinating to join me. Actors, musicians, creatives, highly evolved digital life forms. And we talk about what they love. Sometimes I'll drizzle a little honey in.
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There too if I'm feeling sexy in the morning.
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What keeps them going?
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And you're maybe my biggest competition on social media.
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B
Like when a kid says bruh to.
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Me and how they're navigating this high speed roller coaster we call reality.
- [29:04]
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In Australia, you're looking out for snakes, spiders and boys, right? Hey, he's no Trey McDougal.
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Chill.
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This is like the comments section of my Instagram.
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Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
I think one big like question, we kind of discussed this a bit today and some of the talks like, prompted this today on the, on the last day in which we're recording this, like, why do people practice magic in 2025? Like, what is the, the purpose of all of this stuff besides the, the cool aesthetics, which might just actually be one of the main reasons why. Right, but like why do this? Right. The ability to actually make art is pretty democratized. Culture is this globalized thing that we can affect. On the Internet, it's music, film, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy. Everyone's a sort of intellectual now. Everyone has ability to enter into intellectual exchange. You can be self educated. It's never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now and like this, this goes into this, you know, question that, that someone, someone asked at one of the very last panels is, you know, what's the difference between like a scholar and like a practitioner? And I, I asked like a, a question about, you know, like, you know, what's the use of solitary practice, like a practicing magic as like a personal religious or like spiritual process or as a way to, you know, gain power in the world versus using occult thought to shape culture, you know, doing the occulture process. Right. Which is this, this whole conference is, you know, ostensibly named after and I think specifically talking about these like older forms of magic, like why are these important for occultists, like modern practicing occultists, which this, this conference is attended by. Why, why are these useful to them beyond, you know, in anthropology or like academic sense And I realize that is a big question, but I mean, we ourselves attended a number of rituals this weekend. We went to an Abraxas ritual which was sort of limited by the confines of the conference's setting. But I mean, a lot of these rituals were about, in trying to induce some kind of like trance or meditative state in which, you know, images or thoughts would come into your head and images and thoughts that you, or feelings that you ordinarily, you know, wouldn't feel in day to day modern busy life. Right. And this is, this is a form of why people do these practices. But I guess we can, I don't know, but based on the, the panels or talks we've attended, like go around and discuss, you know, why this is a thing that is worthwhile to these people, but also like the, the sort of tensions that, that we're feeling at, at an event like this.
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I mean, the question why do people get into occultism? Is like, I think there are as many answers as like practitioners themselves really. Because I mean, you know, partly it can be a cultural tradition and you have like a communal or societal lineage that's just like part of the culture. Others who are more, I suppose, more secular are looking for an escape from like mundane secular society. Others, like you said, want power. I mean, if I have to speak for myself, I always find that I come back to the phrase, it's about creating relationships with the world and there's an essence of enchantment to it, but it's also being able to recognize occult movements or the secret, the secret elements that make up reality or the, the vibe. Like the vibes of a place can be like something you connect with and you can kind of give some cultural, cultural shape to, in, I believe like the, the genus loci or like any, anything that's very, I mean, it is a very vague thing to, to ascribe to. Right. Like it's about again, like making, creating relationships with the things inside, inside the world itself.
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I mean, my definition of magic, which I've used for the past few years is that magic is the manipulation of meaning. And that can be internally for you, like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, other people, the things you interact with. But it can also be this, like a cultural form that you're creating meaningful correlations for a cultural capacity.
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Yes.
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Or as a, as a way to affect culture. And I think probably the best talk that I attended this whole conference was by Tom Banger, who is a former member of the Temple of Psychic Youth.
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The North American temple of psychic youth specifically.
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But he gave a talk about how he is dying of brain cancer and the various rituals he's using throughout this process to feel like he's gaining some. Some like, agency or control over his thoughts in this matter. He's not rejecting the reality as it is increasingly evident in his life, but he can control how he frames it. And he specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief. That magic is a bargaining with the world and that can change your feelings and associations with the things that you experience, even if the certain end results might be generally going in a direction that you have a limited ability to influence. And this is a guy who's historically been affiliated with some of the original cultural projects of shaping what counterculture is what we think of as counterculture. This is a person who's been heavily involved with how counterculture, as we currently understand it, has existed since the 80s. And now he has a very personal, magical outlook based on the, as he said in the title of his talk, the proximity of Thanatos, the God of death.
- [35:32]
C
So, Gerd, to answer your initial question, this is something that I have been thinking about a lot too, and engaged with this question every time I attend one of these. These conferences. And I think, I mean, just again, training, I can't help it. But in Max Weber's Science as a Vocation is where he lays out the thesis about the disenchantment of the world. And we can think of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of the very human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the experience of place, and of the connection that exists between people. And one of the things that the best of magical practices does and being in magical community is to give you a conception of time that is other than one that is based in productive capacity. You hear magical people who go to these conferences talk about, now I have to go back to my ordinary life. And their ordinary life, they will tell you, is their 9 to 5 job or the push to go to school, or some sort of productive capacity. So this is a moment of like unbounded time where they get to experience something as fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on whirling magic by an Egyptian woman who used to live in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance and body movement and is an athlete and explained Sufi principles to us, but taught us really the basics of body movement and how twirling can be used as a meditative practice. But we got into a room, she taught us the basics of like, certain kind of like spotting Foot movements. But the point was, is that it was a very embodied movement that made us experience body and time and place and relationship to other people in a fundamentally different way than we would have otherwise. And it seems that the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations I had with attendees, I have to say probably like 8 of 10 of them as I talk to, would bring up this concept of I just, I want to live in an enchanted world. And I think the project of magic is to re. Enchant the world. And there's a certain romanticism with that that I, I, I'm, I'm sympathetic to. But I think that we need to think about this in more of a radical way. And I think that that's the desire that people have is an experience of time other than we have. You talked about magic as your definition of magic is the creation of meaning. Manipulation, manipulation of, of meaning. But part of this is the magic or the conceptions or whether, you know, you think of this as an embodied practice or just purely metaphysical or transcendental, is that it aff the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to the creation of meaning. So there's a certain amount of empowerment. I'm hesitant to take this down the kind of like live, laugh, love affirmations path because we could do that very simply that this is just a spooky version of that mindfulness and these kinds of things.
- [38:27]
B
And for the new age element, that certainly is a major through line across portions of this community. Maybe not as much for this conference, but for other esoteric or woo woo conferences, absolutely, that's a major aspect.
- [38:42]
C
And towards the end of the conference, another thing that really highlights at least my argument that it is about time and body and space and place and connection and experience these things in fundamentally different ways than our daily life. There was also a conflict then between individual practice and what it is that we collectively do. When we think of magic as a process, as either chaos magicians or culture jammers or, you know, thinking of this and kind of like, you know, the temple of psychic youth approach to magic as, as, as putting things out, whether those are products or those are art or those are performances or those are words, or that's Burrows standing in front of a cafe getting it closed, which it effectively did close, is that there, there's a desire for people to exist in community and have connection in community with others. And you do that through conceptions of time and body and space and place and connection. So this is really how I understand the desires and the practices that People engage in when they. They come to these conferences. And you can see it in the way that they kind of like close the elation that they have and what they have accomplished and they have done. And you can see that there's been a process of meaning that has been created through their various experiences. So, I mean, that. That would be my brief summary.
- [40:05]
F
I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was specifically about a culture, because I thought it really hit on some of this. It was mostly talking about the way that the occult has influenced art and art has influenced the occult. How artists end up using the metaphysical, whether they are trying to do depictions that they can communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas or connections or contacts that they make. And one of the speaker's examples was of Gustav Klimt, or whether or not they are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult concepts and ideas and explore them through visual mediums. And so, you know, like Alan Moore's Promethea or the Invisibles by Grant Morrison. And I think he really got into a little bit of the tension there because of an artist as a seeker. And I think this also dives into a lot of the people who are at magical conferences is whether you're there as a seeker, which, you know, what are your needs, what are your desires, what is that? But then as a dweller, are you creating as part of a community? And everyone who came to this entire conference wanted to create as part of a community or wanted to be part of a tradition, or feel like they were part of a continuous thread that is both creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways and able to communicate that to others who are also trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas or existing ones even. But just that continuous thread of both creation and disseminating information back and forth. And I think with magic as well, a lot of people might get into it for a personal reason. But I do think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with people who are professors in ancient history giving lectures on specific things, you're not necessarily just at the level of being a personal seeker anymore, because you are trying to find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking, you'd meditate in your bedroom. But you are trying to find a larger thread and a way of influencing the world around you and also letting the world around you build those relationships and influence you. And you are trying to take in information, to synthesize into something that is more than just an idea you have. But Something that you can continue to communicate and use that to continue the conversation with the world, with other occultists, with other, you know, in this case, historians and academics as well, and bring those threads together and create something new out of it.
- [42:56]
B
What new thing are they creating? What do you mean by that?
- [42:59]
F
I think it gets into the idea of a culture that was both, you know, one of the beginning talks of changing reality, but also at the end, when they're really going into.
- [43:09]
B
This stuff isn't about new things, though, or generating new things. It's about trying to quote, unquote, they keep the old things alive or like, regress back into these. Into what they perceive as these older practices, which may be somewhat manufactured older practices, in which case it kind of. It is a new thing. But under this, like, this mask of, you know, like. Like ancient knowledge, there is certainly people who do want to generate this. This new thing. I think there is a lot of people that are interested more in this. Like, I don't know who's the larger group, but I think there is at least another group of people who is interested in this. The amount of times I've heard people talk about trying to keep the flame alive and talk about these old, old traditions that they're participating in simply to keep them going. I'm not criticizing that necessarily, but that is also another aspect of it which I think has very limited. I think some of these people have very limited goals in actually influencing culture. And frankly, kind of want some of this stuff to remain hidden in that they view that as a more original or stable version of magic and are even frustrated by this capitalist commodification of occultism and how that's. I think the word was the banalization of magic. As you think about how much of our pop culture is influenced by esoteric concepts or imagery from Lord of the Rings to people mentioned today, the Addams Family, Harry Potter, video games like the Witcher, Assassin's Creed, even stuff like Twin Peaks. Other stuff like the X Files, Doctor Strange, Doctor Fate. Comic books have been heavily occultic influence. And some attendees verbalized a kind of frustration at that.
- [45:07]
F
True, but a humongous portion of every evening was movies and music and rituals and performances that people are also doing based on this. And they are trying to integrate these concepts in. And then perform them there to show their inspiration, to show it as to stir conversation, to trigger some. Either sense of the sublime or communicate some sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten out of this to other people, whether it was through music or through the incredible art that there was in all of the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking. So the creation aspect of it was very, very tied to the entire event.
- [45:54]
B
Yeah, certainly. I think one of the biggest manifestations of this thing that you're talking about is in music could throw a stone. It'd be hard not to hit an occult musician in my life. I guess I'm guilty of this. Yes, I know the occult filmmaker even does have some contemporary auteurs. I guess if you consider Robert Edgar's or people who are influenced by esoterica, who are making big budget Hollywood or a 24 style popular films. Yeah, certainly in music that was like the main performance outlet in this conference was the theatrical musical performances. There was very, very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs.
- [46:40]
C
I'm afraid perhaps to respond to this too, I think it's important that we actually look at the kind of composition of conference goers themselves. Naturally there's going to be solitary practitioners that come in or dabblers or people who just like spooky things or musicians, these things. But we also have those who are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are reconstructed of authentic or not in the OTO or in the golden dawn or other kind of orders. There's reconstructionists that are actively attempting again to keep that flame alive or to go back and to reconstruct. And then you have these chaos magicians. Goddamn chaos chaos magicians. Which like this is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I have been having this entire time because they explained like some aspect of chaos magic or I tend to panel. And my response, you know, and again, I understand my complete bias here is I just like, well, that's fine. Why don't you just do ancient magic? We do the same thing. Why don't you just do ancient magic? It's the same thing. And I think that that's actually one of the difficulties here is that there is a kind of, you know, magical grammar to older practices. It is like, you know, if you look at the pgm, it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple things together that works. But the argument that, you know, to go back to my favorite talk or one of my favorite talks on the, the modern Goetia is that if you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a closed one. You have to be in Orthodox, like, you know, the Orthodox Greek Church and have a yaya who's going to like teach you these things and you know, speak the language. And so that's closed. Or be a member of a voodoo house. But that requires initiation and like cross cultural contact and like engagement and a high level of like language skill and ability and money for that matter. Yes, and most people don't have those kinds of things. So, you know, there I. What those damn chaos magicians, I find, are the ones who are actively engaged in the process of the creation of the new. And I think are probably more close to the heart of this concept of a culture because they engage with it in a way that is interestingly very anthropological. Or at least the best of them are dealing with it in a way that is. That is very anthropological. And I have some sympathies there. And then there are some other ones that I just don't quite understand. But that's a story for another time. The talk that you were referring to, there was two talks at the end that were particularly of worth the. Well, a lot of them were. All of the ones at the end were worth. But Francesco the Occulture, the material cartography of contemporary spirituality and the arts, where he talks about the two different approaches to studying a culture, and he talks about the values and limitations of both. And you need an, you know, admixture of them both. But basically there's the sociological aspect and the media studies aspect, which is the more academic of the two, which involves basically what he argued, a secularization of the occult. And this really accounts for the diffusion of like a occult symbols and practices into music, into culture. The Adams family is the example of that. And then the second strain is then religious studies. So the religious injection, excuse me, into art of these sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went over some limitations that was particularly good. But he breaks this down into basically five areas where you have the conception of art, high and low, mediatization versus mediation of art. He gives the example, this is where the Morrison comes in, but he gives the example of the mediatization as Somerset Mawes, the Magician, based on Crowley. But again, this diffusion of the figure of the magician, completely separated from any actual magical practice, but just the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into the secular culture. And this example of mediation, this messianic approach, as he described it, Grant Morrison's comics as a gateway into reality. But this also, I think that carries on to your question that you asked towards the end about Twin Peaks, the Return. Very specifically, you also have then the metaphysical ontology versus the performative ontology which Alain talked about. The intention of the author, the perception of the audience, and then the artist as seeker and the artist as Dwight Dweller, which is also what you talked about too, this difference between the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, the artist who really inhabits that tradition. Which again made me think about the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology. And I think of the example of a very famous book called Mamaloa or Mama Lola, excuse me, by Karen McCarthy Brown, which is in ethnology looking at voodoo practice in a very specific house in New York during a time period Karen lived with Mama Lola for a long time. But really importantly, eventually Karen became a member of this voodoo house. I think I can say that I don't think I'm in trouble for saying this, but she no, it's not in.
- [51:46]
A
The book.
- [51:48]
C
But she represents a very interesting approach to that anthropologists going native. But this was the question that was asked towards the end of like this difference between the academic observer of these things versus the practitioner. And I think that that really gets to the heart of what it is that chaos magic does and the occultural practice that is that you are producing culture and you're very specifically producing this magical occult culture. So it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like two poles of the secular and of of the sacred, of the magical.
- [52:31]
E
Time for a Sofa Upgrade.
- [52:33]
G
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- [53:35]
B
All I know is what I've been told and that's a half true is a whole lie.
- [53:40]
E
For almost a decade, the murder of an 18 year old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist and a handful of girls came forward with a story I'm telling you.
- [53:57]
F
We know Quincy killed her.
- [53:58]
E
We know a story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national tv.
- [54:07]
B
Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.
- [54:14]
E
My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.
- [54:24]
B
I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y' all said.
- [54:30]
A
They literally made me say that I.
- [54:31]
E
Took a match and struck and threw it on her.
- [54:33]
B
They made me say that I or guess on her.
- [54:38]
E
From Lava for Good this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.
- [54:48]
C
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people and small towns.
- [54:57]
E
Listen to Graves county in the Bone Valley feed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts. In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of implementation, importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia.
- [55:30]
A
We had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles and you name it.
- [55:36]
E
But what they find is not what they expected.
- [55:40]
C
Basically, your stay at home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin.
- [55:44]
A
They go, is this your daughter?
- [55:45]
C
I said, yes. They go, oh, you may not see her for like 25 years.
- [55:53]
E
Caught between a federal investigation and the violent gang who recruited them, the women must decide who they're willing to protect and who they dare to betray.
- [56:05]
C
Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand and I saw.
- [56:07]
B
The flash of light.
- [56:09]
E
Listen to the Chinatown sting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
- [56:18]
D
Hey, there. I'm Kyle McLaughlin. You might know me as that guy from Twin Peaks, Sex and the City, or just the Internet's dad. I have a new podcast called what Are We Even Doing? Where I embark on a noble quest to understand the brilliant chaos of youth culture.
- [56:35]
C
Daddy's looking good.
- [56:36]
D
Each week, I invite someone fascinating to join me. Actors, musicians, creatives, high school, highly evolved digital life forms. And we talk about what they love.
- [56:46]
B
Sometimes I'll driz a little honey in.
- [56:48]
A
There, too if I'm feeling sexy in the morning.
- [56:50]
D
What keeps them going?
- [56:51]
F
And you're maybe my biggest competition on social media.
- [56:54]
B
Like when a kid says bra to.
- [56:55]
D
Me and how they're navigating this high speed roller coaster we call reality.
- [57:00]
B
In Australia, you're looking out for snakes, spiders and boys, right? Hey, he's no Trey McDougal.
- [57:05]
F
Chell. This is like the comments section of my Instagram degree.
- [57:09]
D
Join me and my delightful guests every Thursday and let's get weird together in a good way. Listen to what are we even doing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [57:27]
B
Kind of like I guess prior just close up my, my notes here. Specifically the, the stuff on Twin Peaks, the Return. One of the last talks was by Jeff Howard Next stop Universe B, the negatively existent ones and Universe B in contemporary culture which was discussing sort of like you know, mirror mirror world underworld concept. Not, not in like the, the Greek sense, but in the occultism of the British occultist Kenneth Grant. And this would probably be most most recognizable to people as, as the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks is I think one of the better depictions of this sort of concept. It is a somewhat limited version but, but I think it gets at the, the kind of heart of the concept in a way. And he gave this, gave this talk where he was explaining the risks and, and the great power that, that you can, that you can personally achieve through contacting these negatively existent ones or like accessing the magical potential of this sort of like mirror mirror, you know, negative universe to our own and talked about a little bit of Derrida and various various other stuff, but from the perspective mainly as a practitioner of, of of like you know, the, the, the danger and the benefits of doing this sort of magic as written by Kenneth Grant. Jeff Howard did discuss Twin Peaks and the use of Kenneth Grant's concepts specifically in Twin Peaks of the Return. And I asked him in the panel afterwards, how can you balance these two forms of working with occultism or what is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism? You have on one hand this practitioner aspect where you're using it to gain power or induce limit experiences, induce religious or transcendental experiences that change your own perception of sensory reality versus the way that Mark Frost utilized Kenneth Grant's magical world in writing and co creating Twin the Return, which I can argue is a much more effective use of magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts. People who are never going to read books by a relatively niche British occultist which are books which are actually very very hard to find now both you know, getting going into the mauve zone and accessing the non existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus phenomenons which are existent but lack any core sense of being. And how Mark Frost as a. Not sure if he would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest in magic in the occult more so than lynch does. Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism. But Frost's use of these concepts, I think, constitutes an effective contemporary version of magical practice, just as valid as chanting and meditating and closing your eyes. And in some ways, I would argue, even more effective because Twin the Return has existed as both like an evocative force, a force that can invoke certain. Certain, you know, concepts or philosophies, quote, unquote, entities, if you will, as well as a tool of divination. As Twin Peaks, the Return forecasts American decline and the nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is just eating itself. And all of those things are major aspects of what that show is doing. And it uses Kenneth Grant's concepts to get there. And I think that is an accultural project, though that is not a solitary magical practice where you're just meditating alone to try to induce some sort of vision. It is cultural. It's influenced culture. It is probably one of the most well regarded artistic feats of the 21st century. That's a longer version of the question I gave, and the guy did give kind of an answer, which was basically just about trying to. You should, like, balance these two things. You should try to do both. You should try to engage as a solitary practitioner for whatever goals you may have. But it would be a mistake to not try to use this in some sort of cultural capacity to influence culture. But still, that operates on. I guess what I was trying to get at is this similar to the scholar and the practitioner as a false dichotomy. I think this is the same thing as this, a cultural version of what Frost is doing as opposed to an actual practitioner. I think what Frost's doing is using kind of in a chaos magic sense, though not for, I guess, chaotic means. But he's using the contemporary tools of filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into the world that is a. A more powerful form of magic, as luckily, that was distributed by Paramount Showtime, which, you know, certainly helped in the same way, you know, Fox News is useful or effective as a magical generator because of the reach that they have. But I think Frost is just as effective as a magician, if not more so than, I would say, any of the people attending this conference.
- [62:54]
C
The other element I think of that, the talk that Jeff Howard provided there, too. I think that, again, I agree with you, Garret, but he also at length talked about Andrew Cholmondeley and specifically the Rites of the Amethystine Light in The Azoasia, page 347, where he reviews a bunch of nom nouns and things that are there. And Chumlee himself is, you know, responsible the founder of the Cul de Sabati and is, you know, a contributor to the revival of what. What trucks is traditional English witchcraft, which is not necessarily a solitary practice, but it is, it is. It is in many cases. Most of these English witches are. Are pretty solitary. They get to. They talk. There are, you know, treatises that they write and grimoires that are hard to get a hold of. I think they probably exist in PDFs, make good choices about how you get your digital content. But again, that was the tension. He spent a lot of time talking about that individual ritual which. You present Frost as somebody who is popularizing these ideas to a larger culture and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to, you know, not just meditate, but to think and engage with these concepts.
- [64:15]
B
Because of his work, you can think about, like, the allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that. That he fails and succeeds to. To navigate a strange and confusing world and affect change in the world and his relationship to women and saving women. And you can, you can, you can use that as like an actual. Like, you can refer to that as. As a concept and that. That, that builds on some of the, you know, world building of Grant. But now, you know, it's a. It's a cultural dialogue that we can have about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer and how that, I think, can be a positive addition to culture by using occult elements.
- [64:50]
C
Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in 2004, that there's. There's a limited number, it's been passed on, or you could get that PDF online, but who has the time to actually read through this? There's these cultural contexts that don't make sense. There's these concepts that it refers to in a clear network that require scholarship for you to even do that individualized practice. That's a big ask for most people to start to think magically in a popularized kind of way. And seems contrary then to this conception of a culture. Which brings me to the last talk by Carl Abrahamson, the meeting with remarkable magicians, which really tied all of this together, tied all of these threads together in a really interesting way his relationship with Genesis Peorage, with Kenneth Anger, Anton Lavey. With Anton lavey. But that was as another interesting aspect of somebody who is doing practice and engaging in. In community and bringing people together. But ultimately, the question, Elaine, that you and I talked about at the end was, you know, beyond the end, relates immediately to what Garrett was talking about here. Beyond the personal practice in magic, what goals should a culture have? And how can it incorporate its actual goals and ideas into the larger society with the same success that the aesthetics that, you know, have been incorporated into the culture? And I think one of the difficulties that you have there in this individuated practice is that when you look at a figure like Genesis Peorage, you can see that there's a very clear project. When you look. And this is going back to the Perozian element, right? Is that there was a clear practice there. There was a clear kind of like a goal to change culture. Whether that was just purely for the sake of change. I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult of action for the sake of action. There was some kind of personal, political, radical project that we can go back and enumerate that they enumerated at the time that was separate. I mean, that was. Wasn't said immediately in the same breath as the. And now we do this practice. They did the practice, they did the art. And I think that one of the. My response to that, that question is I don't see an articulation of a political or social project that is a. Tied to a culture in these practices. There's a lot of. And this is a very academic practice, a lot of people coming into a room and asking what would it look like if? And to ask what would it look like if? Is not the same thing as let's do a thing, let's actually go out and evoke change, or this is the project now. Let's create a plan and a movement instead. It is this, like, nominalization process of predetermining ends before we even get there based on theoretical assumptions. And I think that that's contrary to the very idea of magic as praxis. Magic is doing something in the world in these kinds of veins. So that's the thing that I would like to see. And I feel like that's something that was getting at at the end. But that's the kind of thing that brings people together to think conceptually to. To. To. To focus on a. An idea that we share and to discuss with one another.
- [68:11]
A
I mean, on that Note I. For context. I've. I'm. Well, still am like part of a chaos magic group called the Domus Chaotica Marauder Underground, or dkmu, who very much is about that. It's like, like established in like the mid early 2000s, if I remember correctly. But it is very much about this core idea of the assault against reality of I guess, like remystifying the world or like making weird shit happen through what. What they call the Elysian Network with Ellis is like one of the. The goddesses of the dkmu. And it's very much like that sort of mix between magic, personal practice, community and like a somewhat unified but also decentralized, like, occult war. Like there's a political statement to it at the end, which there needs to be more of. Personally speaking.
- [69:07]
B
Yeah, there was like some vague gesturing towards like, politics beyond, you know, the mention of, you know, magic as a form of resistance. In the. In the opening, a little paragraph on the program that they handed out. Like there was specifically in the politics of Tarot block, one of the talks about the history of the emperor and the hierophant card, the speaker referred to the United States as having an emperor crisis right now. But that was kind of it. The rest of the talk was purely historical. The talk before that was on queering the Tarot, trying to free Tarot from heteronormative readings. And discussed a few.
- [69:50]
A
Dear.
- [69:51]
B
And discussed a few artists. Discussed a few artists who are attempting to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in the tarot or reflecting the tarot figures, to be more representative of quote, unquote, queer identities. That was kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which is, I guess, kind of lacking. As much as they want this to be a culture, they don't want this to be a political conference, it seems. And I think, you know, if everyone, you know, in their talk had to have some section on like, you know, communism or antifascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad. And that's. That's not what we're saying. But I mean, specifically, I think if they're naming this after Genesis Porridge, they were using a term by Genesis Porridge, who had a very strong idea of why they were doing this work. And specifically, I was very frustrated in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to discuss at length. Some of them may have mentioned it, but discussed Genesis Porridge as one of her core occult practices, was on androgynizing Herself androgyny project, pandrogyny and like, breaking and breaking gender, which they framed as an occult project. And yet even people who she knew at the conference would only refer to them as a him throughout all the talks, including the, the last guy, Carl Abramson, who wrote a biography of her. Yeah, and like, this is, this is. I, I, I do not think this was out of, like, you know, malice. I think this was just a linguistic blockage for some people who may not even been thinking about what they were doing. But it shows, like, an actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose of magic. Or at least what I would argue that is. And what I would, you know, suppose Genesis's androgyny project as a form of magic. But this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for quote, unquote, resistance, since that's the term they're using, not me, which kind of underlines this whole conference. I mean, I think the Burroughs talk was probably the first, the most, the very first. Proto's talk, which we opened up the last episode with, is the most explicitly political one. Talking about going against control freedom in this anarchic or libertarian sense. Or revolt against monotheism.
- [72:20]
A
I suppose one of my frustrations as well is the constant mention of the ccru, which the nobody ever went into depth on, but which, you know, for all its faults and, you know, Nick Land being Nick Land, was very much like a sort of like, radical cultural Marxist, like project. Right. It's like cybernetic Marxism mixed with, like, Crowley and some content, whatever. But the, the is extremely frustrating to see that sort of refusal to engage with, like, the political stuff of it. Because, like, even before, like, Psychic Youth, there was, like, Throbbing Gristle Genesis bands that, you know, pioneered industrial music, who, I mean, this was a bit before punk music, but, like, it very much played with, like, the same sort of shock aesthetics that, like, the early punks would wear swastikas where, like, Throbbing Gristle hat, the logo is very much like a lightning bolt with, like, black and red and white.
- [73:27]
B
Genesis herself engaged in some of this stuff. Not from a fascist perspective, but. But from a provocative perspective. Which mean you can certainly criticize Psychic TV and her for as many, many people have.
- [73:42]
A
But I mean, shock value is kind of overrated nowadays with, like, Internet edgelords. But I very much believe that occultism being this, you know, this collection of practices have been very censored and punished by the church and such things. And I guess these systems of control where I guess I take issue with the. Oh, it's fun and light and love and whatever. But there's a radical element to occultism and a radical possibility to use occultism to again like the whole like cultural, like the idea between personal practice and cultural production. Right? Like creating cultural artifacts and, and putting them out into the world. Being very proactive with the, the, the shaping and the, the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities is a very potent thing to be, to do. And the sort of, I guess like liberalized or like neoliberal idea of like the personal practice and like, oh, I'm changing my perceptions and all these things are fine, but it's more like self soothing than it is about creating change into the world.
- [74:59]
F
If you're not actually changing anything. Are you doing magic?
- [75:02]
A
Exactly. At least that's, that would be my, well, that would be my argument for like, for coming from the chaos magic perspective.
- [75:10]
C
This gets to another kind of trite and facile academic thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably 20 years at this point. I feel like at most philosophy and political science, political theory conferences where the question is not just what would it look like if. But you know, to think otherwise, you know, think otherwise than we have. And usually it's this, how do we think other than we have those kinds of things? And so it, I mean again, magic and as we've been talking about here, is meant to evoke change in the world, to cause change in the world in conformity with reality. If we're going to use, you know, with, with, with will, if we're going to use the Crowley, you know, definition here, which I think is fine, great.
- [75:53]
B
I want a goth girlfriend.
- [75:57]
C
Thankfully you can talk to AI, but I'm worried that she might beat you.
- [76:02]
F
Or that you'd kill her like all my old Tamagotchis.
- [76:08]
C
But this is the issue that we are talking around that the conference and a culture has been talking around. And the political problematic that we're all dealing with right now is how the fuck do we evoke change of the world? How is it when systems of institutional representation within politics and power fail to represent the will of the people? How did the people make change?
- [76:29]
B
And it feels like everything's been tried. I mean, this is where I mean, Fisher, who I would argue is at least an occultist or is at least has some mystical aspect, if not was at some point an occultist, like, you know, reach reached at the point of capitalist realism. It's like most things that we, you know, can think of, we actually have, we, we have given a shot, including, including occultism we have, we have tried to, to do this, and yet here we are. The world's. Maybe not as bad as it has been, but it's not in a great spot. I think everyone listening to this would certainly understand that and I think most people at the conference understood that. And yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical of magic as a, certainly as an individual practice, as a way to cause larger political change. But even can there, even this revolves back to the concept of a culture. Can there even be an occult anymore? Because none of these magical things are very hidden anymore. They're all very accessible. They're all very visible. They're as hidden as queer flagging is, right? As an occultic ritual of hidden signs to communicate with other people in the know. Something that is now you can just look up on the Internet. And I think occult practices and symbols have reached the same point. It's content. I mean, I like the Esoterica YouTube channel as much, as much as the next person, but I mean, are these things even occult anymore?
- [77:59]
C
Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this current at the conference and the other current at the conference, which was the much more traditional magical practices or the folk magical practices or what we would regulate.
- [78:11]
F
Extant magical practices.
- [78:13]
C
Yeah, extant magical practices that were, you know, weren't suppressed by Christianity but carried over. So you have, you had a section on Kimbanda, you had a section on Paloma Yumbe, you have the, the, the, the, the Roma magical school that is being founded in Romania and you have the modern Goetia. The right. Which we identified very clearly as a practice that continues to this very day. The context in which we understand that practice is not a cultum secret like in the. No, it's just that, like, it's the stuff that you grew up with. It's every day. And in that case, it's not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence. It's a kind of enchantment. Are kind of like, you know, European, Protestant, Catholic defectors. Whatever has brought you to the occult in the first place don't experience as a community or community engagement. But those are also things that can get deeply conservative.
- [79:07]
F
They are. And, but also the parts of those practices that do require initiation that are not something that everyone's grandmother is doing, are also community based and exist specifically in and for community and you know, as occult projects that have influenced the world.
- [79:26]
C
The Haitian revolution, the good revolution that we should all be talking about.
- [79:30]
F
No, but these things do. But I mean, the occult has bubbled to the surface in material ways, very, very explicitly in some instances. And so I think there could be potential. But it does require being in community and being in service of community, even if it's not a practice that is being practiced by every single person around you.
- [79:55]
C
To be an ongun or a mambo in Haitian Voodoo is to serve the community. It's not simply just a matter of magical woo or something like that, or the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like, individual, magical sense. No, you're serving your community. That's what it is that you're doing. It's first and foremost a service position on the Haitian Revolution. Look, I understand this, like, standing the American Revolution makes you, I guess, a classical liberal or whatever it is that you fetishize that into. If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you a classical conservative. Right? If you stand the Haitian Revolution, I guess that makes you a radical. The myth, the legend, the discussion, this understanding is that the Haitian Revolution was.
- [80:40]
B
Was.
- [80:41]
C
Was sparked by the possession of the Loa. Specifically is elite Danto, who, you know, sacrificed a pig. There's depictions of this in Haitian art all over the place. This leads to, you know, slave uprisings, rebellions, revolution. Well organized. Fantastic.
- [80:57]
B
Yeah.
- [80:58]
C
Magical practice in action.
- [81:01]
B
And that wraps up our panel discussion on the 2025 A Culture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan and Elaine for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin. And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing all of the talks I recorded and writing my written report on the Occulture Conference, where I can go into a bit more depth into some of these topics and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism and its ability to. To infest, influence or undermine culture versus culture's capacity of eating away at the occult. That report should be coming out before the end of the year. See you on the other side.
- [81:51]
E
It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us.
- [81:59]
B
Out out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple.
- [82:01]
E
Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. This is the story of the 1. As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies, supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers, all so that he can help students, staff and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.
- [82:42]
B
Johnny Knoxville here. Check out Crimeless Hillbilly Heist, my new true crime podcast from Smartless Media, Campside Media and big money players. It's the true story of the almost perfect crime and the nimrods who almost pulled it off. It was kind of like the perfect storm in a sewer that was dumb.
- [83:00]
D
Do not follow my example.
- [83:03]
B
Listen to Crimeless Hillbilly Heist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
- [83:15]
E
The murder of an 18 year old girl in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved for years until a local housewife, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.
- [83:28]
C
America, y' all better wake the hell up. Bad things happens to good people in small towns.
- [83:40]
E
Listen to Graves county on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad free. Subscribe to Lava for Good plus on Apple Podcasts.
- [83:54]
B
I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast.
- [83:58]
F
Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation.
- [84:00]
B
About how to be a better you.
- [84:02]
A
When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denial is easier. Complex problem solving takes effort.
- [84:17]
C
Listen to the Psychology podcast on the.
- [84:19]
B
Iheartradio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [84:24]
A
This is an iHeart podcast.