Generation Hex Chapel of Sacred Mirrors 2005 retro

'Welcome to - how do you say - "a hole in history itself."

This book is about magic, and about Generation Hex, teenagers and young adults who practice it.'

- Jason Louv (from Generation Hex, Introduction)

 From Binding the Occult: 

the panel that was there that night

For those of you that weren't around during it's heyday it would be hard to understand. There was no proper term for it. I could say Hyper Culture, I could say Ultra Culture, there were a million different terms for what was going on. It was a movement. The internet was still fresh and new. It had been born from some chaotic cesspool and out from it came a storm of ideas and people who were steeped in all sorts of eclectic occult knowledge. One, especially a sixteen year old boy, could just bathe in. Here was a world where the only books I could easily find were by a witch named Silver Ravenwolf, and suddenly I am diving into ideas that until recently were completely obscure.

This cesspool of ideas? I was there. Barely a High-school student. Every day I would come running home from school to get online and scroll through the infinite amount of occult blogs pushing out new ideas and thoughts and being young and having all of this information, and all of these minds, and all of this knowledge just laid out and left for me to stew in was unlike anything that will ever happen again. Before the vanity, before everyone online was selling something, before the promises of fortunes and riches if you only pay an exorbitant amount to be taught the secrets, before you could click on Google and type in a name and everything would come streaming down. 

Out of that complete chaos came one book, from as far as I am aware, that captured it if anything could possibly capture a little of that magic. The book was Generation Hex. It is much like the current crop of collections of essays put together by publishers like Scarlet Imprint. Jason Louv brought together a group of these occultists that had been pouring out this informational stream and had them write pieces for this book. 

To begin with, it was published by Disinformation which at the time was run by a man named Richard Metzger, if you don't know who Richard Metzger is than you probably don't remember what it was like when subcultures were really subcultures. Most of the publications by this publisher were conspiracy books, books I loved. I would almost summarize them as the Conspiracy Theorists Before Conspiracy Theories Were Cool publishing company. Though that wasn't all they covered. They loved subcultures. Especially subcultures, again from what I can remember, that were considered dirty back then. And really, a lot of what was would still be considered dirty today. 

So here is Disinformation, teaming up with Jason Louv who I had followed and read pieces from long before this collection joining to put together a book that would grasp together all of this subculture, for a lack of a better word, and make an imprint on the global mind of history. He collected the best of the best and let them tell their stories.
They did it. 

He also wrote his own pieces for the collection, which I could almost say outshine the rest of the book and at times made me wish he would write a book himself. He never wrote a book on the occult, and yes I have asked him to. 

Till this day I would say there is no other book that completely grasps a moment of time better than Generation Hex. There is no other book that captures my imagination, or fully explains what it means to be an occultist. 

Step back from that, and it is a collection of essays that showed the occult in life. Living the occult, living mysticism, what it meant to be a magician in the world. This book captured it.

If you want to hear the Gen Hex authors talking about magic, this is the audio recorded at the launch party at Alex Grey's CoSM back in 2005.

Little Steps Towards Personal Truth, pt. 1

"Kether is in Malkuth. And Malkuth is in Kether, but after another motherfucker." - William Clark

Before I explain to you what that means, I'd like to preface this deviation from my recent political meanderings with an apology. I fully realize that most people are put off by terminology like "occultism", "Hermeticism", or "magic(k)". I will try to remedy this prejudice by making all of my personal examples as clear and concise as I can. As with everything, your mileage may vary. Given that a personal foray into the murky realms of Western Esotericism, alternative psychology, and general semantics is more in keeping with the general workflow of this site than others, it isn't entirely out of place. But I am fully aware of the risk this poses to the overall sociopolitical agenda I have been working towards in the last few months. I could potentially alienate people from me by talking about this. The tendency for the overwhelming amount of humanity is to fear that which they do not understand, and that is unavoidable. There is, as the theologist Alan Watts once argued, a strong societal taboo against knowing one's self.

So be it.

I am a magician. I have been for at least a decade now. I will be coming up on my 26th birthday in 2013. I have been formally crashing my way through the harrowing, awe inspiring and sometimes frustrating world of the occult since I was 16 years old. It is a rewarding path, and I have found it to be ultimately responsible for jumpstarting much of my personal growth as an individual. When I look back on the larval state of my entire being at that tender young age, some of the stupid blunders and mistakes I have made (and often continue to make) are greatly humbling. I owe much of the progress I have made from a clueless, morbidly self-obsessed and disaffected suburban kid into a self-actualized creative person to the serious work I have done with self-integration and individuation: A four-fold process of personal evolution that is psychological, spiritual, physical and psychic in nature. In addition to this, I have come to learn that the universe itself provides the initiatory catalysts, the teachers, and the guides that we need. But only when we are ready for it. "Ask, and ye shall receive. Seek, and ye shall find." The teacher comes when the student is ready.

Into the Hyper-real 2 - Cargo

by Cat Vincent (Part 1 here )

One of the key perspectives in the work of Adam Possamai in regard to the ‘hyper-real’ postmodern pop-culture belief systems comes from his background as a sociologist. As a result of this, he frames a lot of his analysis of the phenomenon as manifestations of late-capitalism. Put simply, he sees them on one level as product.

He’s got a point. Pop culture, by definition, is something we can buy. (Or steal, or bootleg… but I’ll get to that later.) It’s a manifestation of mass production and dissemination. It’s worship of things you can buy in a shop. Production line totems.

In other words, it’s kind of like a cargo cult.

Living The Myth (Part 3 of 3)

“In what strange simplification and falsification man lives! One can never cease wondering once one has acquired eyes for this marvel. How we have made everything around us clear and free and simple! How we have been able to give our sense a passport to everything superficial, our thoughts a divine desire for wanton leaps and wrong inferences! How from the beginning we have contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, lack of scruple and caution, heartiness, and gaiety of life- in order to enjoy life! And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance could knowledge rise so far... Even if language, here as elsewhere, will not get over its awkwardness, and will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees an many subtleties of gradiation; even if the inveterate Tartuffery of morals, which now belongs to our unconquerable “flesh and blood,” infects the words even of those of us who know better- here and there we understand it and laugh at the way in which precisely science at its best seeks most to keep us in this simplified, thoroughly artificial, suitably constructed and suitably falsified world- at the way in which, willy-nilly, it loves error, because being alive, it loves life.” (Beyond Good and Evil, Fredrich Nietzsche.)

The final part of "Living The Myth" is up on JIVE magazine's website. This entire series is probably gloriously inappropriate for their average readership, though I could well be wrong. (By that, by the way, I don't mean to imply that it is above them, so much as that this series is only tangentially connected to electronic music, hip hop, or video games. But I was given carte blanche, how could I not playfully abuse it?)

If you missed the first two parts:
Part One: Deconstructing The Modern Myth.
Part Two: So Much For Truth.

The original, somewhat abridged version of these essays ran in Disinformation's Generation Hex.

I'm probably going to take a break from running stuff on JIVE for a while, except for news and the occasional review. My focus is moving to Alterati, which is coming along nicely.

Living The Myth (updated - Part 2 of 3 on JIVE Magazine.)

http://www.jivemagazine.com/column.php?pid=7843

False is the Phantom Thou Seeketh

The following has puzzled me for a while. The thought re-occured to me, so I felt I'd mention it... though it likely won't make a whole lot of sense to you if you haven't at least briefly tangled with the tar baby known as Western Occultism.

I've seen quite a few would be magickians in the past years who either aspire to or claim to be in the process of 'crossing the Abyss.'

I wonder to myself-- how can someone do that, and still believe in something like magick? The framework, the underlying beliefs, the Path itself-- all illusions like anything else. Illusions which need to be discarded when they hinder more than help you.

A magus doesn't believe in magick any more than he believes in the flying spaghetti monster. Which begs the question. Why talk about magick at all?

Any of us who have been pitched into that paradigm know what it's like when you start. You're like a kid in a candy store. (Except all the candy is covered in liquid acid and filled with razor blades.) It's okay to feel that enthusiasm. But just because the spectre in the shadows talks to you doesn't mean he's real.

This is one of the many reasons I ceased external interest in the subject.

An upshot of that, and this is interesting- take the faith which props the whole belief system up away... and watch all the portents, omens, transcendental dreams, visions quests, and grandiose cosmologies crumble into the dust they have always been. This is equally true with any belief.

The inverse is also true. But sorry Mr. Carroll, you can't fake yourself into truly believing something, except through a process of baby steps.

I think I can genuine say I don't believe in anything outside of specific contexts, anymore.