Make America Magical Again (MAMA)
A History of Countercultural Magic in America and the Potential of a Magical Renaissance
In mid-July, there was chatter of Joe Biden stepping down and Kamala Harris becoming the presumptive nominee. Among the mainstream media scribes that supported this idea, there was a subset of extremely online media junkies that floated the idea of being “coconut pilled” and joining the “K-hive” — Kamala Harris’s online fan cult. I was skeptical of how effective this would be, short-term or long. They were gonna try to play the same meme game that the Trump stans did in 2016 but the influence the online right had on Trump winning was vastly overstated. What’s more, the left can’t meme. Especially the center-left.
On the same day Biden announced he would not run for reelection and that he would support Harris, a more important endorsement came: Charli XCX tweeting “Kamala IS brat.” These three words would mean nothing to anyone over age 35 or even most of Gen Z, but to the extremely online girls and gays that made nonstop memes based on the iconic cover art of XCX’s breakthrough hit album, it was the Batsignal. The K-Hive was joined by the Brats. Within days, enthusiasm was building online for Harris. She wasn’t laughing maniacally anymore, she had a down to earth laugh. She wasn’t vomiting word salad anymore, she was sharing folksy wisdom about how we are all connected to what’s around us.
A day after she announced her run, I heard an episode of Team Human with Richard Metzger where he discussed how magic has been used in propaganda as well as through the counterculture of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Now I do agree with Freddie DeBoer and Chris Jesu Lee to the extent that memes will not be enough for Harris to win. She needs to energize the working class, etc. But I am astonished at the spell the K-Hive has cast (side note that’s too good to be a footnote: right-wing activist James Lindsay claims Kamala’s Marianne Richardson-lite catchphrase, “what can be, unburdened by what has been,” is a Satanic Communist witchcraft invocation). Weeks before, it was so easy to mock Harris as being a flesh-and-blood incarnation of the TV show Veep; as a babbling pseudo-philosopher who was in over her head; as a DA who screwed over more Blacks than maybe any other candidate. And, of course….as a war criminal. Now, she represented hope; down-to-earth joy; fun; a brighter future; for some, even, she represented….not being weird.
The meme magic got me started on the path of inquiring about magic and media, but that is not what I want to focus on here. The Team Human episode made me question why we haven’t really had a magical, mystical, counterculture since the ‘60s and ‘70s. Like host Douglas Rushkoff points out in the episode, magic was driven underground during the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s. Can magic be a countercultural force again? Can magic be the force that drives the revolution above and beyond politics? The alt-left cannot even make any cultural works in the independent sphere that are effective. Can they infuse magic into their protests or will an entirely new countercultural force need to emerge?
Before we tackle all that, we should look back at the past seventy years of countercultural magic in America. But before we do that, let’s look at why our focus is on countercultural magic in America. Unlike any other country on the planet, America was a country built during the Enlightenment strictly on Enlightenment ideals. This is what is meant when people talk about the American Experiment: can a country be run on principles, as opposed to commonality that a typical ethnostate depends on? Other countries not only have ancient traditions, but are connected to those traditions. Italians have ancient supernatural myths, thus magic, thus the occult. Same with countries in the Global South, etc. America, by contrast, was build on Native American land. Yes, we can tap into the myths, into the folk magic, of all the tribes. But this brings up questions of cultural appropriation. What’s more, as America is (in)famously a nation of immigrants, each group is more likely to tap into magic from the Old Country than adopt new rituals based on local indigenous customs.
Lest we get in over our heads, let me pin down a word as inscrutable as “magic.” I am not talking about Chris Angell or David Copperfield. Nor am I talking about Harry Potter. Half the time, I won’t even be talking about actual magic being practiced. To use a word of our times that may be exhausting as of this writing, but too relevant to ignore for this discussion, I am talking about magical vibes. I am concerning myself with countercultures and subcultures that do not shy away from even a passing mention of the occult. Magic never left the subcultural space. It just got pushed further and further underground until its resurgence about ten years ago. OK now I am getting ahead of myself. Before I accidentally summon dancing broomsticks, let’s look back at the history of American countercultural magic.
There were quiet rumblings of the counter(o)culture in the ‘40s, when celebrated novelist Henry Miller moved to Big Sur., turning the mountainous California community into a hotbed of spiritual activity virtually overnight.
Miller represents a genuine bridge between the generations and the continents – in 1930s Paris, he was already reading Blavatsky, Rudolph Steiner, and Gurdjieff. In California, he continued to study astrology and Eastern and Western spiritual teachers, wrote a book abut the utopian mysticism of Brethren of the Free Spirit, and transmuted his earlier pornographic obsessions into what Jeffrey Kripal calls a “panerotic nature mysticism.” He also visited the baths that would later form the omphalos for the Esalen Institute, whose institutional devotion to mind-body practices would, starting in the 1970s, bring tai chi, tantra, and other esoteric practices of the enlightened body into the mainstream of American psychological culture.
Meanwhile, future renowned underground film provocateur Kenneth Anger — one of the earliest American devotees of Aleister Crowley — made his first film, Fireworks, while he got high at USC.
But the ‘50s was when the foundation for an American magical counterculture was cemented. Influential folk music archivist Harry Smith practically taught all pioneering ‘60s musicians everything they knew about the world:
Smith later moved to Manhattan, and in 1952, made his most lasting contribution to the counterculture: the Anthology of American Folk Music, a powerful and uncanny collection of early blues and old time music that became the Rosetta stone for folkies like Bob Dylan and the Fugs; among the obsessive notes Smith included quotations from Robert Fludd and Rudolph Steiner. Smith’s films grew more iconographic, and featured animated montages of Tibetan godforms, interlocking Kabbalistic trees, and Amanita muscaria mushrooms. Smith was also a serious student of Aleister Crowley.
As Erik Davis notes, the weird hippies of the ‘60s (along with the punks of the ‘70s) grew up on the weird trash culture of the ‘50s: “EC horror comics, rock’n’roll exploitation records, UFO flicks, and Mad.” As those kids became hippies, they would read another less trashy, but no less weird, book: Aldous Huxley’s 1954 book The Doors of Perception, about his psychedelic experience with mescaline. The book helped spread interest not only in psychedelics, but in alternate paths of spirituality and consciousness. This openness to pathways outside of Judeo-Christian practice expanded the horizon, opening more minds to magic and the occult.
Of course the predecessors of countercultural magic in America are the predecessors of the hippies themselves: the Beats. Jack Kerouac’s lesser-known novel Doctor Sax has magicians along with werewolves and vampires. William S. Burroughs (another Crowley enthusiast) was deeply involved with the occult:
Burroughs distrusted language as a vehicle of self-expression and spontaneity, considering it more as an occult battleground where the forces of control waged war against subversive and even nihilistic attempts to break the spell of conventional signs. Sensitive to the rivalry and paranoia that court magical thinking, Burroughs was, in the early 1950s, already writing Ginsberg about the use of curses and “black magic;” he also traveled to South American in a prescient plunge into the serpentine depths of yage (ayahuasca). In Paris in the late 1950s, when he also studied Scientology, Burroughs developed the cut-up method of artistic composition invented by Brion Gysin, linking the sort of oracular juxtapositions already found in Dada and Surrealism to a postwar model of information processing and media manipulation. Gysin and Ian Sommerville, a crony of Burroughs’, also constructed the dream machine in the early 1960s, an inexpensive device whose consciousness-altering flicker effect anticipated the countercultural quest to use drugs and media to, as Burroughs put it in 1964’s Nova Express, “storm the reality studio.”
What all of this has in common is a rejection of Plastic America. Taking their cue from the Surrealists, the Dadaists, heck even the Romantics, the Beats turned to the mystical and the occult.
From the very first year of the 1960s, when The Morning of the Magicians was published1, there was a growing appetite for the esoteric and unusual. The cult hit, about fantastical phenomena like UFOs and alchemy, stood out in Paris:
It was the Paris of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, of ‘nausea’ and ‘the absurd’, of alienation and of being engage, of black turtlenecks and Waiting for Godot. In such an atmosphere, a book on magic would be the last thing one would think would do well. But within weeks of its publication, Le Matin des Magiciens had both banks of the Seine talking about alchemy, extraterrestrials, lost civilizations, esotericism, Charles Fort, secret societies, higher states of consciousness, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
From the start, color and wonder were in vogue, though it wasn’t popular everywhere yet.
It didn’t hurt that rock and roll itself had ties to the occult already. Derived from the blues, which gave us the legend of Robert Johnson’s Faustus tale, arguably the greatest American folk tale (if only because it prompted those who heard it to seek out his records), rock music was “devil’s music” according to alarmists. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s hit “I Put a Spell on You” might not have helped.
The match that lit the mystical magical powder keg of course was LSD. Timothy Leary, the high priest of the psychedelic movement, saw himself as a modern-day Aleister Crowley. Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters did not believe in coincidences, but what Jung called “synchronicity.” In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Kesey tried willing The Beatles to appear in his sprawling LSD documentary using his mind. As you might have guessed, it didn’t work. This was in 1964, when they were still touring and didn’t turn on yet.
You don’t need to know that The Beatles had a picture of Aleister Crowley on the iconic album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to know that they were magical beings. For decades, alt Gen Xers and Millennials couldn’t understand why The Beach Boys were constantly overshadowed by The Beatles. The common answer is that The Beatles more wholeheartedly embraced the counterculture as a band. But the more subtle answer is they exuded magical vibes to what would have otherwise been a repackaging of the Beat Generation ethos. For generations all over the world, bohemians took drugs and created groundbreaking, popular art. The Beatles were unabashedly childlike, singing about yellow submarines and tangerine trees. John Lennon named the song “Come Together” after one of the hexagrams in the I Ching, which the Chinese have used for oracular visions for centuries.
You could make a box set out of how many generational anthems were on the radio in the ‘60s. One we will look at here is The Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Do You Believe in Magic?” Released in 1965, when the hippie movement was really hitting its groove, John Sebastian was inspired to write the song when he saw a girl dancing in the crowd of one of their gigs:
The younger girl stood in contrast to the older beatnik crowd who typically attended folk performances, and Sebastian recalled that "[she was] dancing like we danced – and not like the last generation danced".
But what makes the folk-rocker an anthem is its central question: do you believe in magic? Do you have faith in new possibilities? I have brought up three Sixties before:
The first two Sixties never really went away. For decades, they have been treated like the most important Sixties to preserve: the Sixties of social and technical progress. The Dropout Sixties has played out again this decade since the antiwork movement and has only accelerated as Ivy League students put their potential careers on the line protesting Gaza. But The Magic Sixties…that has not really seen a resurgence. Just to clear the air, I am aware of the dark magic that was conjured during the Sixites. Manson’s mind control, the Stones’ Luciferian blues that arguably caused the Altamont murders, etc. Since I can be a jaded Gen Xer, I should make clear that I do not hope for countercultural black magic. There has been enough black magic to go around the past decade (more later). I’m talking about a faith in magic that is so invigorating, there is hope we will evolve into a new race!
From Gary Lachman’s mesmerizing book on how the occult influenced the ‘60s:
But as we will see, one needn’t have looked that far back in history to find an interest in the idea that a new man was in the offing, and that for him to prosper, the old man would have to go. Along with many other esoteric ideas, the notion became quite popular among the Aquarian generation. By the mid-sixties, the notion that a new man was brewing amidst the paisley and day-glo was commonplace. Ancient astronauts then were not only a symbol of a forgotten golden age, but a signpost to the future.
The hippies were not only inspired by arcane pseudoscience. They also revered classic fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland as well as contemporary fantasy that blurred the lines with sci-fi (Ray Bradbury).
One of the central paradoxes of the Age of Aquarius was that it was a time of the mind as well as the body.
Indeed, a primary source for counterculture’s thirst for spirituality was its only apparently paradoxical embrace of the intensified body. Permissive and experimental sexuality, coupled with the ecstatic and drug-fueled collective rituals of live rock shows, helped forge a Dionysian sensibility that readily looked to and absorbed the imaginal and energetic transports of occult phantasmagoria and the protocols of mysticism.
This carnality only hastened the popularity of the new ways of thinking and living. Magic and the occult were popular throughout history. What made the Sixties different was this was the first time in Christian history that alternatives were being openly proposed. Magic and the occult were competitive with Abrahamic religion for the first time.
There were even ironic religions being invented, like Discordianism, whose most (in)famous proselytizer, Robert Anton Wilson, helped contribute an important facet to the new “religion”: Operation Mindfuck.
Operation Mindfuck is an important practice in the Discordian religion, in which "all national calamities, assassinations, or conspiracies" are publicly attributed to the Bavarian Illuminati, an 18th-century secret society, in an attempt to "sow the culture with paranoia"
It was only a matter of time before the relatively staid New Left would incorporate the hippie movement. By 1968, they were one and the same. Now the antiwar movement had more fascinating political aesthetics, even if the peace sign was a sigil-like symbol that the anti-nuke movement had since 1958.
The most famous (attempted) magic trick of the ‘60s was when the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon in 1967. I quoted Norman Mailer’s Armies of Night (about that event) before and I will quote it again here:
“The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next; that was what was good about it.”
Or, as Lachman, says in Dedalus, magic had an unprecedented opportunity to spread farther and wider than ever before:
Via television, radio and paperback books, in the mid-sixties to early seventies, mystical and magical ideas reached an unprecedented audience.
Another central paradox of the Sixties was that it was simultaneously a time of great enchantment and great disillusionment, often at the same time. The enchantment with new ideas arguably came from exhaustion from the old ways. Spells were being cast and broken. The biggest spell that was broken of course was the American Dream.
The Sixties dream itself would of course have its own spell broken by the occult Manson murders. Even though, the Seventies saw magic and the occult grow stronger in America. Robert Anton Wilson’s books gained a cult following, as he helped popularize chaos magick, a new type of magic that was postmodern and relatively pragmatic, not belonging to any particular order or deity. The mark of Manson never really left, of course. Dark magic was running rampant. Black Sabbath ominously intoned about witches at black masses.
By now, you may have noticed that many of the musical artists discussed in this article about countercultural magic in America are British bands. Remember when I wrote about faith in new possibilities? Part of what made the Sixties and Seventies magical was the openness to other countries. As I discussed before, since the ‘80s, there’s been an insularity to American pop culture that has hurt it.
In the ‘70s, Americans worshiped the Hammer of the Gods. Led Zeppelin were like a Hegelian synthesis of The Beatles’ mystical white magic and The Rolling Stones’ Crowleyian black magic. As if there was a contest over which British rock band was most into the occult, Led Zeppelin’s four members each chose their own rune/sigil for their fourth album (which to this day is untitled).
That album was released in 1971. By the late ‘70s, America was losing the magic. Older boomers were doing business deals at discotheques — disco, a genre of music that didn’t even have the spirituality of soul music, let alone magic, but had a pornographic obsession with sex, at the expense of anything cerebral or mystical — while young second-wave boomers and borderline Gen Xers preferred the smart, ironic style of new wave rock. Both disco and new wave were postmodernism’s first beachhead against the mystical, magical Seventies and Sixties.
The true decline of the American magic came in the ‘80s, when the Satanic Panic gripped the nation. As news stories about Satanic pedophile teachers (that were later proven false due to false memories) alarmed parents and reinvigorate the Christian Right, heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Iron Maiden were also targeted (to say nothing about actual Satanic music acts like King Diamond). Even role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, in which players cast fictional spells, raised ire from concerned parents. From the ‘80s onward, magic and the occult would be moved back underground to subcultures like dark metal and Goth.
The turn of the century was the absolute low point for magic and the occult in America. The jaded, ironic slacker ‘90s had flashes here and there (rap acts like Wu Tang Clan and Gravediggaz; Vertigo comic books that provided fascinating modern fantasy like Sandman and The Invisibles), but it was never enough to make headlines or raise eyebrows in suburban PTA meetings. In the ‘00s, most indie music, while it may have borrowed musical gestures from ‘60s rock, left behind the esoteric. I say “most” because a dramatic exception was the freak folk indie subgenre that gave us such marvelously bizarre acts as Devandra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Animal Collective. Despite the relative paucity of bizarre symbols and practices in the hipster counterculture, there was great potential. As the ‘00s progressed, the hipsters became more twee and whimsical. There might have been a magical renaissance at this time, but two things prevented this: the New Atheist movement that gathered steam in the wake of Islamic terrorism, thus pushing first-wave hipsters away from anything that had a whiff of superstition, including magic; the breathless optimism for technological and social progress that the Internet inspired throughout the decade, culminating in the election of Obama. Who needed magic when you had broadband?
A moment in 2009 would reawaken America’s potential for reawakening: Rhonda Byrne appeared on Oprah to talk about her book, The Secret. Throughout the influencer-infested ‘10s, manifesting (where you imagine what you want with as much detail as possible and it appears in your life) would become the practice of the decade. More than meditation or yoga. Though no one would argue that this is magic, this is not countercultural magic. It is the exact opposite. As the always great Brad Troemel says in The Healing Report, it is magic in service of enhanced productivity.
This is not to say that the hashtag activists did not try their hand at a little of the ole magic. In 2018, a coven of witches tried to place a hex on US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Like most things in the 2010s, even the occult became more politically charged than ever. Witches — most of them either female or members of the LGBTQIA+ community — made it their focus to attack Christian male patriarchy as often and as loudly as possible (in contrast with witches in the ‘70s, who were primarily concerned with nature and self-growth). Even Satanism took a more activist turn in the ‘10s. From the ‘60s on, most Satanists were LaVeyan, focusing on self-interest and individuality; a more dramatic expression of Nietzsche. The Satanic Temple (TST) however had a more activist approach.
But while the contemporary Satanist movement shares with its predecessor a willingness to embrace Satan’s symbolic countercultural appeal, it combines Satanism’s focus on the self with clearer, more outward-looking political goals.
There was a sense of collective effervescence to these actions these witches and Satanists took. Unfortunately, it was a shallow type that plays better on a Reddit message board. Even something as mystical as magic is being re-engineered to appeal to the logical, political, shallow left brain instead of the more holistic, open right brain.
This is not only an issue for the left. The MAGA movement (in)famously was — is — even more tied to magic and the occult. Donald Trump has been a lifetime devotee of New Thought and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. Steve Bannon had a rabid interest in the writings of far-right Italian occultist Julius Evola. This was to say nothing about the meme magic on Reddit and 4Chan.
Meme magic—the half-joking idea that Donald Trump could be “memed” into victory through judicious 4chan shitposting—became part of the site’s rhetorical landscape. Due to the valiant efforts of brave shitposters, the “God-Emperor,” as Trump was frequently known on the site, would be propelled to the White House, where he would quench his thirst with an endless supply of liberal tears. This meme magic was represented visually by a cartoon frog named Pepe. Originally a relatively innocuous cartoon character created by Matt Furie for a comic named Boy’s Club, Pepe became, through the inexplicable machinations of Internet meme culture, the de facto symbol for the burgeoning Trumpian online alt-right. It just so happened, 4chan soon discovered, that there was, in fact, an ancient Egyptian chaos god with a frog’s head that resembled the newly ubiquitous Pepe. His name was Kek.
Even indie films were having difficulty avoiding the call of the weird. Though A24 is now an indie studio associated with films of every genre, in the late ‘10s they were primarily known for folk horror fare like The Witch and Hereditary.Though films like Midsommar may have given voice to women chafing against patriarchy, the relative subtlety of this message ensured that they would be remembered as classics.
Even with all this paranormal activity, the 2010s still kept the optimism in tech and science from the previous decade. It wasn’t until 2020, during the COVID lockdown, that the exhortation to “trust the science” was met with widespread skepticism. MAGA maniacs were not the only skeptics either. The anti-lockdown (and, in 2021, the anti-vax) movement attracted strange bedfellows; Trump fans, proponents of alternative medicine, healthcare workers who were skeptical of the measures being suggested by the WHO, writers in lower Manhattan who still wanted to have wild drunken parties. Sean Monahan, a trend forecaster who foresaw the normcore trend of the 2010s, wrote about — and coined the term — “vibe shift,” which he noticed in Manhattan in spring 2021, when New York City was coming to life again.
The idea of a vibe shift was very much informed by the late spring of 2021. Covid at last had a vaccine and predictions of a “hot vax summer” peppered the US media. We could finally leave our houses. If the vibe shift felt more disjunctive than usual, our inability to experience street life for more than a year was probably the culprit. Millennials went into lockdown still feeling young, but they came out shocked to find the first cohort of Zoomers now ruling the roost.
Perhaps a bigger signal of a vibe shift was the word “vibe” itself having a resurgence in everyday language. As the linked-to Drift article states, there seemed to be a resurgence of enchantment but, unlike the ‘60s, it was during a rough economic climate. From the article:
From vibrations quickening the air between us, to the morass of the internet, to the dead end of just vibing: the journey from the counterculture occult to the platform occult can feel like one bad trip. Its arc is certainly not an upward one. Still, it is worth resisting the temptation of tragedy. Vibe, mood, and energy don’t just testify to the depredations of platform capitalism, even though each of these categories may have denatured under its pressures. They may no longer speak to us about utopia, but they do tell us plenty else. There is a latent, if weak, critical power in naming a vibe, a mood, or an energy.
A common thread that seems to run throughout this decade so far is the potential for the Internet as a tool for the occult. A popular idea in the downtown fringe movement, especially in the crypto community is the idea of network spirituality, where memes and shitposts can lead to a collective consciousness online. An even more popular concept, one that has been repeated by neoreactionary PayPal Mafia guru Curtis Yarvin, is Nick Land’s idea of hyperstition: that if you speak about something or write about something enough times, you can will it into existence. This idea was influenced by Aleister Crowley.
But it has been this summer that has seen the largest spike in bizarre, woowoo, occult activity. Several astrologers predicted that July would be a time of chaos before Trump got shot and Biden stepped down. For this reason, if you go on TikTok now and look up “political astrology,” you will have more than one page of results. This is not the first time we have turned to the stars to read political futures. As far back as the French Revolution, people read the stars to predict what the Jacobins would do next. But the access to this knowledge is unprecedented.
Networked media isn’t the only conduit for woowoo either. Like most new, but scary developments in artistic technology, AI has been cherished/feared for the wrong reasons. The synthesizer had the potential to replace musicians entirely; instead it was prized for its unique, contemporary sound (which is why to this day it is mainly employed to give an ‘80s flourish). Though the recent tech bubble bust may have reduced this type of talk, most people who discuss AI art, music, etc. can only understand it in terms of replacing or not replacing human artists, musicians, etc. As I have written before, working with AI feels less like making art and more like conjuring magic. Prompting an AI video through Runway feels more like making sense of a dream than making a movie.
This isn’t the only intersection between AI and the unknown. A recent resurgence in Tarot readings has caused some to turn to TikTok videos of AI readers as well as going straight to ChatGPT.
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Braver souls are even using ChatGPT to actually make chaos magick spells, taking the world of technomancy to unprecedented levels. And it’s not just the users of tech who are resorting to magic. Even the tech gods themselves are not above swimming in the woowoo.
Even the firmly skeptical, such as the Rationalists – Silicon Valley-based members of tech-adjacent subcultures like the Effective Altruism community – have gone, well, a little woo. In an article for The New Atlantis, I chronicled the ‘postrationalist’ turn of those eager to blend their Bayesian theories with psychedelics and ‘shadow work’ (a spiritualised examination of the darkest corners of our unconscious minds…Whoever shapes the perception of others, in order to get what they desire, is practicing magic.
All of these conditions make our moment ripe for a portal into the world of countercultural magic. All that is needed is faith. Right now there is still plenty of skepticism. It would be wise to focus less on casting spells right now and focus on breaking them first. Though truthfully there are not too many to break. The spell of “COVID science” has been broken. The spell of Biden being in charge has been broken. The spell of tech bros being living gods has been broken, thanks to the unseen hand of the stock market bitch slapping them Monday. Kamala Harris’s meme magic may have momentarily taken the eye off the ball with Gaza, but her less-than-magical response to a Gaza protester has ensured that only the converted feel the fever.
But the bigger spells still cast their shadow. We are still prone to reductivist, left-brain thinking. Though we seem to have no problem understanding that we are slaves to technology, we don’t seem to be aware that we are also slaves to the reductionist forces of social science. Even if postmodernism is dead, we still insist on deconstructing everything around us, without ever acknowledging that, yes, dammit, some things do lie beyond social constructs. Now it may be true that, in light of the decline in religion, we may resort to a secular morality. But a discussion of morality without nuance can only be taken so seriously. We certainly can’t take simplistic, literalist art seriously. The literal world of propaganda pop and art has strangled the imagination so no new, truly revolutionary ideas can reach us anymore. That’s a word I don’t hear anymore: imagination. We have lost interest in visions, in opening our minds to new worlds and possibilities. Even our cinematic fantasy world has been stuck. Open-mindedness and imagination are not only helpful for pop culture. It makes us open to avant-garde art we don’t understand:
Even the bad avant-garde films forced me outside my comfort zone. They got me thinking and feeling. They stirred up ideas and emotions. Sometimes the best part of the experience was the heated discussion with my buddies, after the movie was done, on “why did that film suck so heinously?” I needed these experiences for my personal development, and would not trade them for a hundred superhero sequels.
And then, of course, was the encounter with real masterpieces of cutting edge art. I would have never found these if I hadn’t kept exposing myself to creative works outside of the mainstream.
Hope is not lost though. We can make America magical again.
‘s Trend Report today is on how chaos edits are the “now” artform. Here’s an example of a video in this genre:
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Like William S. Burrough’s cut-ups with Brion Gysin, they have the potential to disrupt the language virus, breaking the spell of institutional, linear meaning. Unlike the shitpost meme genre they no doubt grew out of, these videos have not (yet) devolved into inside jokes about beefs between microneighborhood celebrities. What’s more, it is refreshing to see anything on the Internet not purport to have knowledge or information, but to make an intrepid leap into the unknown.
While the occult may still see a larger following stateside, it is growing exponentially in England:
As we recover from the societal ravages of the pandemic and prepare to submit to our AI overlords – a technological revolution many predict will make humanity redundant – the notion of more powerful supernatural forces within the universe feels ever more appealing. A similar surge in occult beliefs was observed after the First World War and the Spanish Flu, when many bereaved adults turned to seances, and Aleister Crowley established his Abbey of Thelema on Sicily. There was another burst of enthusiasm in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Cold War and Vietnam drove hippies to embrace their inner Gandalfs and Morgan le Fays.
The Voynich Manuscript, an ancient medieval script written in a language that no one has been able to decode, might finally have its secrets unlocked. Then again, the stars are always available for anyone to read.
Further Reading
Strange Rites, Tara Isabella Burton
The Dedalus Book of the 1960s: Turn Off Your Mind, Gary Lachman
Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump, Gary Lachman
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Erik Davis
It was first published in France as Le Matin des Magiciens.
Nice One Mo! Light another …
https://youtu.be/Q33DjhUO38c?si=wOaqBKTzukrKaZ7f
HERE FOR THE MAGICAL RENAISSANCE ✨ SO GOOD.
because I am a woo-woo woman of the west coast I must share: pluto has recently moved out of capricorn (money) into aquarius (technology) and will def be bringing new mass movements in art, social media, and collective beliefs. media + magic is one of my fave esoteric topics so thank you for this very thorough and well-written take!