This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. If you’re just joining us now, please go back and read…
Tag: occultism
A Few Notes on American Magic
Over the last week or so I’ve been spending a certain amount of time reviewing some of the things I studied and practiced and wrote about in years long gone. Partly that’s something I do from time to time, but I also had another excuse. Next year Aeon Books will be bringing out two volumes…
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Twelve Rays and the Seven Cosmic Planes
This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available…
The Kek Wars, Part Four: What Moves In The Darkness
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how a band of outsiders linked by the network of online forums loosely called “the chans,” and armed with the tools of chaos magic, found themselves in the midst of a cascade of meaningful coincidences and strange happenings, more or less clustered around Pepe…
The Kek Wars, Part Three: Triumph of the Frog God
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how thousands of disaffected young people who’d been shut out of our society’s circles of privilege and denied the ordinary routes to adult independence turned to magic, for the same reasons that their equivalents have always turned to magic. As we discussed in the…
The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral
In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses…
The Kek Wars, Part One: Aristocracy and its Discontents
Every month or so since the 2016 presidential election campaign hit high tide, somebody has asked me to say something about the weirdest and most interesting aspect of that campaign: the role played in it by a diffuse constellation of right-wing occultists who united for a brief time under the banner of a cartoon frog.…
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Forces of (Negative) Evil
This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available…
The Cosmic Doctrine: The Dawn of Manifestation
With this post we begin a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s going to be a wild ride. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available editions of The Cosmic…
On Occult Literature: A Diversion of Sorts
It so happens that last week’s post on reading books by dead people had a curious echo. In a forum I frequent where occultism is the subject of discussion, an earnest young person put up a plaintive post, asking why so much classic occult literature is so boring to read. As usual in such forums,…