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.

Join My Cult! ebook introduction

Here is the new introduction to the Join My Cult! ebook presently available on Original Falcon's website.

Rewind the tape to 2000, suburban America. Our progress had reached an apex, and while it would in retrospect be seen clearly as Hubris, at the time, there was no end in sight. At this time, it seemed there was the beginnings of a second (or third?) wave American counterculture that never actually completely coalesced, derailed by the conspiracy theories and atrocities that defined the following near-decade.

1998-2000 is when the core of Join My Cult! was written, despite the publication date. I organized and wrote a great deal of it, but really it owes itself to a group of friends that shared a similar experience moving out of adolescence at that time. The bulk of the conversations in this book are real, derived from online and off-line interactions as we delved headlong into exploration of psychedelics, the occult, and sex.

One criticism often leveled at this text has been that "real people never speak like this." This makes me laugh because, although it is a perfectly valid criticism- sane people certainly don't- in this case, we did. And it is with a tongue-in-cheek mockery of our often overly enthusiastic, nevertheless earnest state that I left this material mostly as is, even though I shudder to think some might take it purely at face value.

It has been interesting, over the past six years or so, to receive letters from readers- most of them telling me, to my surprise, how much the book effected them or even "changed their lives." Of course, amongst these were also plenty of people who felt the need to tell me how truly awful it was, and the notable few who actually went so far as to threaten my life. (I take this as the highest compliment.) When I wrote this book, I was unsure it would ever be published, and certainly many of my friends told me it would be for the better if it wasn't. After it was accepted by New Falcon, I had some hopes of it becoming a break-away cult hit.

In the end, it was neither of these, remaining that odd book you might stumble across one day in the corner of an independent book seller. A puzzling, hilarious, train-wreck of an oddity.

I have come a long way since I wrote Join My Cult!, and (I hope) have grown a great deal as an artist and writer since. But there is an intensity that comes with the blind, youthful enthusiasm of a project like this that I doubt I could replicate. New Falcon never properly edited the first edition, and in retrospect, I'm not sure I can blame them. There are many things in this text that seem like grammatical mistakes, that are intentional (particularly changes between tense and point of view with psychotic frequency), and I can only imagine they gave it a go and threw their hands up at the prospect. I occasionally consider giving it a thorough edit myself, but that thought is quickly washed away when I plunge into the text. This edition does have some minor edits from the original which saw its way into print, and you will find some new additions in the appendix, but there is little I could see changing without possibly disrupting the oddly symmetrical whole of this book, which at first glance looks a lot like total chaos.

So I'm offering it for free now, warts and all, to whomever wants to come along for the ride- and I hope in the process I will introduce some of you to a repository of common experience that might seem strangely familiar.

James Curcio
2009

For more of my work, (writing, music, interviews & more) see http://www.jamescurcio.net This free eBook is released under a Creative Commons License. You can share and print it to your heart's content, though you must get my permission for any other use at jamescurcio at gmail dot com

Read the PDF:



(Link for the image impaired.)

Sign up to the Fallen Nation blog feed (includes the Join My Cult! audiobook, presently in progress.)

Free stuff at esozone!

A selection of Mythos Media & Immanion Press products will be offered in a raffle at Esozone, the occulture / fringe art event occuring now in Portland.

EsoZone Update!

For those of you who haven't bought tickets yet, I suggest you do so. This year's event looks to be bigger and better than last, including luminaries like Dennis McKenna, Antero Alli, Paul Laffoley, musical performances, and a lot more.

If that wasn't enough, "famous on the Internet" James Curcio will be there. Presenting an audio installation, as well as possibly a workshop. I am also working on lining up a special late-night treat for all of you- I'll make an announcement if it goes through.

Esozone.

Esozone Speakers.