"As the Western world continues to accelerate towards information overload, a sort of crass lust for a non-offensive, non-distinct, all-inclusive "spirituality" has become more and more prevalent. Spirituality as a way to ignore the uglier aspects of life and focus on a highly bankable "eternal moment," a soothing white light to clutch like the Orgasmatron in Woody Allen's Sleeper.
In such a marketplace of belief, in which every world faith has been pureed into a homogenized feel-good power shake, it is often the options with a tad more grit to them that stick out. Voodoo, witchcraft, the abyss-transfixed "magick" of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare and, in the case of this recording, the solipsistic sorceries of a generation raised on late postmodernism, a fragmented mediasphere and the self-conscious posturing of "chaos magic."
While it is the most fevered belief of the "New Age seeker" that all paths lead to the same destination (and that, of course, it is never the destination that counts), one wonders if these strange children of the new millennium may well have eaten so much microwaved food that even such watered-down generalities as the "path" or the "destination" remain valid concepts to them. How does one teach patience, humility, quietude or mindfulness to a generation accustomed to terrorizing its elders with the unsettling speed of its "channel-surfing?"
The book release for Generation Hex, at Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, was certainly a troubling sign that our children are willing to believe anything as long as it speaks in their "jive-talk." A throng of two hundred arrived to pay tribute to these "anarchs of the new paradigm"—James Curcio, the novelist and musician; Angelina Fabbro, the scientist; Micki Pellerano, the filmmaker; Atman, the academic; Rachel Haywire, the warrior; Shaun Frenté, the diva; and Jason Louv, the editor and circus ringleader, luring the children in. Jupiter, Mercury, Luna, Saturn, Mars, Venus, Sol. Seven seals.
And though the speakers did their best to calm the crowd from their murmurs of end-times, there was something undeniably Apocalyptic to the proceedings. Could God not only be dead, but have been so picked over by the banal "spiritual" masses that only the spears of Reason, Doubt and Humanism which killed him in the first place remain to prop up a new faith with?
The occult teachers of the past carefully coded and obfuscated their teachings. I hazard a guess that it was so that neophytes such as these couldn’t get their pudgy, pink fingers on them. Yet they have indeed, and their peers are, chillingly, taking them seriously. When Ezra Pound spoke in fear of the "sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor," he might well have been speaking of this spiritually bankrupt "magickal" generation, raised by equally spiritually bankrupt, "permissive" and liberal parents.
If this is truly the grubby face of the "end of linear history" that de Chardin and McKenna predicted, then I can not so much give a positive review to this release as I can a negative review to the last several thousand years of linear history for having let it come to this."
-- Dr. Marvin K. Moloch, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of California at Bohemian Grove
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On October 27, 2005, these infamous "children of the new millenium," authors of the hit Disinformation anthology
Generation Hex descended on Alex Grey’s
Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in New York City. Speaking to a full house, the group's discussion and debate as to the nature of magick and its place in youth culture at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century is contained herein. If you couldn't be there in the flesh, this
74 minute recording of the proceedings is the next best thing.
