ACFM - ACFM Trip 27: Magic

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

We live in irrational times. From the resurgence of interest in astrology, tarot and occultism to the deepening influence of conspiracy theories and positive thinking, culture is experiencing a turn towards the magical. What does that mean for those of us on the “weird left”? Nadia Idle, Jeremy Gilbert and Keir Milburn gather round the […]

Thanks for coming, we're the K Foundation, and we're going to show you our film, which is called Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quidd. And it lasted about an hour, and I hope you enjoy it. Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. They've all found ways of making their own holy magic. Manifest your dream life. Why do things are the way they have? the way they happen.

Everything that people talk about with regard to magic is all absolutely true. As long as you understand that it is happening inside people's minds. I put a spell on you. Welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol and I'm joined as usual by Keir Milburn. Hello. And Jeremy Gilbert. Hello.

And today we are talking about magic. So guys, this was definitely not my idea. So does one of you want to start out and tell us why are we talking about magic on the podcast? Well, it started actually. I saw a tweet by producer Chal, Chal Ravens, who one of the producers of our magnificent show. And she just read a book about the KLF by a guy called John Higgs and their title of that book was the KLF Chaos Magic and the band who burned a million pounds. And she said, oh, you know, I can't remember what she, she wrote a tweet and I basically straight away got on to our ACFM Slack and said, let's do an episode about magic.

And that was partly because that whole like the KLF burning a million pounds, you know, what's going on, why did they do it? You know, it sort of reminded me of that some of the weirdness that was around pop music in like the 80s and that was the early 90s as well, actually. But then when I started to think about it about, like, things such as chaos magic, and we'll explain these terms a bit later, perhaps. Just a quick one on chaos magic is that it's really tied up with sort of like belief, the idea that believing in something can really, really strongly can have an impact in the world.

And, you know, ultimately the sort of more magical end of it is, you know, that beliefs and thoughts can be materialized in the world and that sort of thing. I just thought that that's actually quite an interesting way to get into ideas around belief, ideology perhaps, you know, the idea that believing in something can create, can create something in the actual world, yeah, I'm going to say that. You know, that is actually a big part of like common sense, etc. And so I thought it would be an interesting way to get into like the sorts of magical thinking that that exists in common sense, in political thought, etc. Yeah, and also lots of other things around magic. I've always been interested in it as a concept. I don't know if it

has any real political significance and something we'd explore. I've always been interested in magic and idea as an idea and the history of magic and esotericism and occultism as ideas. And also I am interested in the role that they play in contemporary culture. I think one of the big shifts has happened in popular culture, mass culture, popular fiction, especially, we're not especially actually screen fiction cinema TV but also comics you know prose fiction over the past few decades is the fantastical the magical within which I would include things like superhero narratives has really become completely central to popular fiction in a way in which it actually just wasn't say in the late 20th century or the mid 20th century so that is really

interesting. I'm really interested in the way in which there are all kinds of historical and sort of pseudo-historical debates around ideas to do with magic. And I'm interested in the way that feeds into things like the revivals and inventions and reinventions of esotericism and paganism in the 20th century, for example. So I think there's a lot of really interesting things to say. And I think ultimately it'll be really interesting to think about concepts like enchantment, disenchantment, re-enchantment, and how that relates to issues like ecological crisis. So I think there's a lot of different dimensions of this topic that are worth exploring. Yeah, for me, this has been a really interesting one. I just want to be

completely honest for the listeners and say that when Keir suggested magic, it made me feel quite icky. And I wanted to explore that in the first sense of when that came up. And I was thinking to myself, why is that the case? And I think it's because, you know, I consider myself a materialist and, you know, someone who is into science and the scientific method. And I guess I have this impression that magic makes me feel, makes me think of, you know, something that's, you know, dark and the occult. And I don't know, like online misogynistic communities. And I don't know. And I think maybe because culturally, like, I'm just not interested in fantasy and I'm not interested in fantasy as a novel form. And so I was thinking about this and I was like, okay,

well, you know, obviously you guys convinced me that it was a good subject to talk about. So I guess some of the things that I'm interested in in relation to magic after having thought about it is things like what the relationship is between magic and power and accusations of power over history and that whole idea of, you know, things being secret versus being public and like whether magic, when magic was thought of as a good thing and when it was a negative thing and it immediately made me think of, you know, the witch trials and gaslighting and stuff like that. But I'm sure that, you know, you guys have some fantastic stuff to talk about. So as you expand, I'm sure I will have some things to say.

But that's me on my little bit distant from this one, I have to say. I mean, I've got to admit it's out of my comfort zone as well. But I've actually really quite enjoyed thinking about it and reading about it in preparation for this. And perhaps one of the ways we could get into it, Nadia, and sort of like concretize it a little bit. Or a starting point might be seen, as you mentioned, the KLF, to explain who the KLF were. and like this link to, perhaps it's a link to chaos magic or certainly that sort of sphere anyway. The KLF were a band in the early 1990s

made up a Bill Drummond and Jim Corti and they had, like basically they were the biggest selling singles band in 1991. They had a series of like really big hits. We should play something actually. We should play something by KLF. They had this series of hits basically in like 1990 and 91. But they'd already been involved in the music industry

before that. So before that, like Bill Drummond was around sort of erics and around that sort of punk and post-punk scene in Liverpool. And then he managed Echo and the Bunny Men in the early 80s. And he managed him really badly because he was managing him in accordance with these really weird ideas. So he'd organise a tour for them to play. And when you map that tour out onto a map, it would look like a pair of big bunny ears, basically. So it would make no sense at all. if your main purpose was to have a nice, well-organised tour. But for him it had some sort of significance, you know, and he wanted to disrupt ideas about, you know,

what the music industry was for, I suppose. I love it. Go on. And then he met Jimmy Coty, who had also in a couple of bands in the 80s. And they had a, before they formed the KLF, they formed a group called the Justified Ancients of Moomoo, which is a name taken from the Illuminatus trilogy.

They're justified and they're ancient and they like to roam the land. They're justified and they're ancient. I hope you'll understand. They call me up in Penalty. So in the Illuminatus trilogy, the justified agents of moos are the agents of chaos, just to explain that.

And that's probably why they were talking about that. We'll talk about this book, The Illuminatus trilogy, a bit later, I think, because it feeds into things around this sort of chaos magic, discordianism and these sorts of like, are they real or are they put-ons? Are they ironic religions and magical practices? Are they real magical practices?

It's not quite clear. And then in 1988, they had a hit. I don't know if you remember this. They called themselves the Time Lords and have the hit called Doctoring the Tardis. Yes. So they'd had these, they'd been going through these things. In fact, Doctor in the Tardis is the number one hit. And then they wrote a book called The Manual, How to Have a Number One Record,

which was this idea that you could just demystify the music industry. You just lay out these points. This is how you have a hit record. And they'd worked with Stock Aiken and Watermen, these music producers just had this series of hits right through the 80s and so forth. so basically in like 1990-91 they're the biggest band the biggest singles band in the world and klf i was always told that it stood for copyright liberation front even though copyright begins with a begins with a sea i was told that was the idea because they used a lot of sampling

is it like acfm where it's like an obscure so we won't tell people what things stand for yeah yeah so they'll never say what it's what it's for basically but yeah and yeah so the justified An Anast of Moimo, I think they, I think that was just, that was, that was an album they made just out of samples, but they would, like, sample, like, huge, like, most of the song. And basically, they, they, they, I think they had to go and burn all of the albums. They made a big ceremony out of it because I think Abba objected because they sampled, like, one of their songs and, like, changed it a tiny bit, put it, put it out or something like, so they're this, they're this, this, this, this attitude that they want to destroy. the music industry, but they also love pop music and these sorts of things. So then in 1992, they basically declare that they've retired from the music industry. They get, like, nominated. I think they win the Brit Awards that year, and, like, they have to, when you win the Brit Awards, you go and play at the Brit Awards.

And they've got, like, extreme noise terror, I think, to play a hardcore punk version of 3 a.m. E.tern. And then the idea was that they were going to. dismember the corpse of a sheep on stage and throw the sheep into the audience, but they didn't do that. They couldn't get the sheep in, so they dumped it at one of the, outside one of the after parties with a note tied to it saying, I died for your sins or something like that. So anyway, they have this, you know, that's the sort of stuff there. That's the sort of stick they're getting up to. And in 1991, they declare, they send out a message saying, you know,

we have retired. The KLF has retired from the music industry. So they're the biggest selling singles act. They retire for the music industry and they delete all of their records, which means that you can't buy them in any format. I think they can't get played on the radio. I'm not sure. Wait a minute. What do you mean delete records when everybody had records and hard copy? Oh no, no. Yeah. But basically that you will not be able to buy one of their records ever again in any format. And apparently this cost, this, you know, this probably cost them millions basically, many millions. They weren't too bothered about that. Then they set up They rebranded the two of them as the cave foundation,

as like an arts foundation. So in 1992, they basically, they sort of accelerate this, like, you know, we're going to disrupt the music industry by basically nailing a million pounds to some wood, taking it to the Isle of Dura and then burning a million pounds, basically. To the where? The Isle Dura, just a remote island up in Scotland. They find a disused. disused building, no one around, just them and somebody video in it,

and they just burn a billion pounds, takes ages, gets really boring, they filmed it. And this is sort of like, that actor sort of dominated their lives, basically, and the book, there was a documentary I watched about it recently as well, and it's all about, like, they've never really come to terms of it, they never really understood why they built burnt a million pounds. They sort of filmed it and then toured around the country, showing the films and asking people why they'd burnt it. and everybody was really outraged

and you should use this for charity or something like that, basically. And so it's this idea of like, you know, they were a successful band who wanted to sort of disrupt things. They wanted to add an element of chaos. They wanted some sort of like to do things and not explain why they do them

and do things and actually not understand why they do them. So quite a lot of the book is about how they felt as though they were sort of caught up in this. dialogue that went on between the two of them, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, and they basically egg themselves on to do these things, not knowing why, but I feel as though they couldn't get out of it. At one point in the Brit Awards in 1992, they were discussing how to fuck things up. And one of the ideas they had was to cut, one of them cut their

hands off and throw it off, throw one of their hands into the audience. You know, it's one of those things that they only just managed to pull back from that sort of thing as though they were caught up in these ideas between them that was pulling them along, dragging them along, and they end up in this used barn burning a million pounds, not really know why they're doing it,

not being able to explain it afterwards, and then obviously having quite big effect on their lives subsequently, basically. Cool, that just sounds like they're being subversive. Yeah. I mean, it just sounds subversive. Where is the, like, how is this related to magic? Yeah, so the book by John Higgs,

basically it sort of says, like all the way through the, you know, the Echo and the Bunnymen stuff, Bill Drummond has these sort of sitting ideas that are sort of non-rational and these sort of like non-rational causations where you know, he thinks it's really, really important

to create these tours for Echo and the Bunnymen which look like a pair of a pair of rabbit ears, basically, but he can't explain it, do you know what I mean? So John Higg says that Like, this is part of, like, their, it's basically akin to chaos magic. And one of the things that was that are driven, Bill Drummond in particular, was he, when he was young, he went to go and see a play version of the Illuminatus trilogy. So the Illuminatus trilogy is this sort of like, this huge sort of fictional piece of fiction in which sort of like ties together this idea of that there's this secret society to Luminata who are controlling the world.

it was written as a piece of fiction. People have sort of like included that. It's a commonplace in contemporary conspiracy theories to take it seriously these days. And basically, yeah, so it's that, like that sort of like weird, weirdness around pop music, it sits alongside this idea of like chaos magic, of beliefs having like a power of their own and you can get drawn into it, drawn, you know, as though there was some sort of like magic spell cast between the two of them who were dragging them towards this fate that they didn't actually, they wouldn't have gone towards if they hadn't met sort of thing,

that sort of idea. That's the sort of link to magic that is drawn out in the book. So let's explain what we mean by this term discordianism. Discordianism is a sort of joke religion invented by a couple of American guys in the early 60s and its practitioners claim to worship the goddess eris, the Greek goddess of discord, disorder and chaos. And insofar as it has an actual philosophy, it's sort of borrowing from Zen and Taoism and Nietzschean philosophy and it's anticipating certain strands of postmodernism. And its basic idea is that all belief systems, all ways of viewing the world,

are perhaps equally arbitrary. So what you should do is sort of play around with different sector beliefs or have no real beliefs. And beyond that, it's never really clear what it even means to be a discordion apart from to own some of the books produced by some of these guys or possibly belong to a group

that perpetrates pranks such as deliberately trying to make people believe conspiracy theories because actually what you're doing is satirizing the very idea of belief by doing that. And I actually think discordianism does contribute to the development of a sort of individualistic, libertarian, almost solipsistic common sense within the culture of Silicon Valley by the 1990s. It's certainly not the only contributor to the emergence of what

Richard Barbera, of course, the Californian ideology. But I think it is actually one of the components of it. I mean, the way I would situate that episode in terms of a history of modern magic is there's this big, uptick of interest in things like magic as a magical practice and at the end of the 19th century, in the beginning of the 20th century, which is really the moment when modern sort of occultism and magical practice is born. I mean, it's partly to do with the sort of invention or the discovery of the idea of the unconscious, you know, which, you know, is manifesting the invention of psychoanalysis. But it's already, psychoanalysis itself is coming out of

like the discovery of hypnotism and mesmerism and things like that in the 19th century. And there's a lot of fascination. And so with this idea of the unconscious, unrational and the sense that there are these aspects of human experience, which are sort of not accessible to ordinary conscious rationality are incredibly powerful. And you have a powerful effect in the culture, powerful effects in politics, in our lives. And there's lots of different ways people want to explore that. You know, Freud wants to turn it into a sort of science, which will have a therapeutic objective, but the surrealists, you know, want to create a whole artistic movement out of exploring it. And one of the aspects of that interest in the idea

of the unconscious and its power is this idea that, well, actually, maybe traditions like ritual magic, like that you can trace back to ancient Egypt, maybe what they're actually doing is they're finding some organised way of, like, tapping into this power. Maybe you can actually find some way of accessing what either a sort of collective unconscious or a personal unconscious, which is some sort of wellspring of either just extraordinary inspiration or maybe it is actually possible to cause it to have material effects in the world. And this set of ideas, they get reconfigured and played out in lots of different ways over the decades. And in the 70s and 80s, there's quite a lot of kind of interchange between that set of ideas and

traditions and indeed people starting to study things like chaos theory and various forms of psychology and even sort of self-help coming out of things like the human potential movement in the 60s. And there's this quite, in the 80s in particular, there's this quite weird mixture of that includes elements like conspiracy theories and it includes people being really interested in wicker and paganism and includes being interested in trying to think through the philosophical implications of quantum theory and the idea that mathematically at least we inhabit a universe of multiple overlapping worlds and what does all that mean and also this does end up connecting with various you know, strands of sort of gallery art practice and even strands of popular music.

So you get things like the Temple of Psychic Youth, a sort of, a sort of occult organisation which comes out of the industrial music scene, which is part of the sort of post-punk scene in Britain. And a lot of the time in all of these traditions, and this is true of the surrealists back in the 20s, there is a sort of, there's a sort of continuum. between people who think that you might engage in some weird sort of ritual or some divinatory game where you like roll dice or use the tarot or the I Ching to try and determine a course of action

or something like that just as a sort of psychological exercise or just as a sort of symbolic refutation of Western ideas of reason or something like that. And people who think that actually, you know, maybe the E Ching really can predict the future. Maybe the tarot really can guide your actions in some cosmic way. Maybe you really can make people fall in love with you or make yourself get rich or something like that

by tapping into cosmic forces or the collective unconscious. Or maybe there's no difference between the collective unconscious and actual cosmic forces external to human minds. And so there's this very blurry area and there is a lot of it going on in the 80s in particular but I think you'd probably have to do a more detailed history to sort of explain why the 80s in particular actually it's the moment when this still kind of bleeds into popular culture

and there's probably two main explanations you could give of why that is I mean one would be sort of a fairly positive explanation that it's like the culmination of the way in which you know pop music becomes a site for the you know they're testing out all kinds of radical ideas, you know, from situationism to Marxism to post-structuralism. And this is just part of that, you know, you could situate the KLF or the psychic TV as the band associated with Templar Psychic Youth, situate their interest in sort of vaguely occult ideas that are also associated with things like surrealism. You could situate that

alongside, you know, scriti-polity being into Gramsci and Derrida or, you know, the gang of for drawing a Marxist theory. You could situate it alongside all those things as all outcomes of this kind of the intellectual crucible, which was British art schools in the 70s and 80s. You could do it that way. I think you could also be a lot more down on it

and say, well, look, actually, this is the sort of leftovers of the failure and defeat of the new left and the council culture in the 70s. I was going to say, that's what instinctively. Once the revolutionary promise of the 60s and 70s, has been defeated, what are you left with? You're left with burning a million quid and not even knowing why

are some kind of gesture of defiance. And I mean, I think there's something to all of those explanations. That does speak to a whole interesting question about the whole, you know, sort of history of the concept of magic and what its relationship is to forms of radicalism and also forms of political conservatism, actually. Voodoo Raid by a guy called Gerald, or also known as Gerald Simpson, It's from 1988, a sort of, sort of an acid, well, hit from the Acid House era.

And so Voodoo Ray is actually a sample from a Derek and Clive album, which were comedy albums that Peter Cook and Dudley Moore used to produce. And so Gerald Simpson was trying to sample Peter Cook saying Voodoo Rage. But the memory of the sampler was so small. It came out as Voodoo Ray and a legend was born. On a voodoo-ray. Oh-du-Rae. Oh-du-R-Rae.

Oh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Miles Davis, this classic track, Miles Davis track, Miles Runs the Voodoo Down, which is from Bitches, Bitches Brew, which is an album, the cover of which is all, it has this kind of cosmic and magical imagery. Bitches brew is kind of a pun on Witches' Brew. It's alluding to an idea of magic as a kind of feminine power. When I was coming up as a young punk or post-punk, the sort of counter-cultural scene of that time, did include things such as like pranks, you know, which looked a little bit like burning a

million pound. Quite an expensive prank. But there were things such as Loom Panics catalogue. And I've got a, there used to be this thing in the US called Research, this produced these big books around sort of counterculture. One of them, it was, I think it was to do with semiotex, you know, it's an offshoot of that. And one of those is about pranks. And there was this whole tradition of like, you know, post-situationist pranks and, you know,

playing tricks on people and like playing with belief and so forth and things such as discordianism, which is this, you know, which is not going to discordianism now. Let's come back to that. Yeah, okay, we'll come back to that. But it was that sort of like that played a role, you know, it was part of that, that sort of playing with reality sort of idea, was definitely part of, you know, the wider sort of counterculture, if you could so call it that. And then isn't, isn't the, sorry, don't Trump, but isn't the central, but isn't the central, thing that makes magic magic, the question about, like, is this real? Because it feels like talking about tricksters and tricks and surrealism is not the same thing. I'm trying to understand

what we're actually talking about. Well, I think there's a weird continuum, isn't there? There's this continuum. Okay. Well, it is a whole, so part of our problem here is none of us are actually involved with, you know, esoteric magical practice, although we know that there are people who are, are people who are, and I do know people who are, but I haven't sat down and talked to them about them for this show. I have talked to them about it before. And it's very difficult when talking to people who are really into this stuff, to get a clear handle from an exterior perspective on whether they are saying that conducting some ritual where they, for example, invoke either are completely made up, deliberately sort of invented, you know, magical

entity who they want to be in communication with, or they invoke some ancient Greek or Roman or Mesopotamian god or something, for some sort of purpose. Whether they think they are really genuinely communicating with some sort of spiritual entity that actually exists outside of their imagination, or whether they see it as purely a sort of psychological exercise, which might have effects on them in terms of how they feel about and relate to the world, or whether they're operating from an epistemological perspective, according to which there's really no difference. And there is this grey zone. There's this grey zone between actually believing that ISIS or Mother Ahuyahuska or, you know, the machine, the DMT machine elves, or great

Cthulhu or whatever, actually exist, actually exist in the sense that people ordinarily use the term actually exist, meaning they are objects which exist. exist in the world, which would exist whether or not people believed in them or thought about them, and have effects in the world irrespective of the actions or intent of those people. And on the other hand, them just not existing at all and just being complete fictions, just like stories people might tell would be fun, but have no relevance to the real world. But then there's this grey zone within which people, you might say, well, to the extent that these things might represent like powerful psychological archetypes that people having some sort

of ritual engagement with, people thinking about a lot, might have a real effect. Yeah, no, this is useful, this is good, I like this. This is a good way to talk about it. Loads of people here into yoga, for example, or things like yoga meditation, like doing sort of devotional work by doing mantra meditation or something, focused on one of the Hindu deities like Shiva or Vishnu or Lakshmi or Tibetan, say, sort of Buddhist, deities like Tara. And most of those people, if you really pin them down, are not going to say, yeah, I believe somewhere out there in the cosmos like Shiva exists and he's looking at any, and I can either talk to him or not towards him. They're going to say, well, Shiva's a sort of archetype. He's like this image

of sort of cosmic energy or of the universe as constituted by cosmic love. And it's useful psychologically to imagine him or it as a personified being. And engaging in some sort of intensive meditation on that might be subjectively experienced as devotion to an exterior and really existing deity, even though I might also accept that from a scientific perspective, that's not what's really going on, what's really going on, is I'm sort of engaged in a psychological process in deliberately cultivating psychological state in my own.

self, that's one way of thinking about it. There's also this whole zone of things like neuro-linguistic programming, which is a whole psychological practice where people just deliberately engage in self-hypnosis. And they believe that, well, if you actually, if you hypnotise yourself to believe that you will definitely get that promotion, then you are much more likely to get it. And then it gets into all these kind of popular versions of that, like, so manifesting. I was going to say. So there is this grey zone within which all these things, exist, I think. I don't care if you don't

won't me, I'm yours right now. I put a spell on you. Because you're mad, mine, my! So Jay Hawkins are screaming,

Jay Hawkins, as he's also known, song I Put a Spell on You, you know, in that tradition of seeing seduction or love as akin to magic. The story goes that that was originally going to be recorded

or they recorded a version of it just sort of as a straight sort of blues song, and then they all got drunk in the recording studio and started wilding out, and that's when Jay Hawkins became known as screaming Jay Hawkins and started screaming and whooping it up,

basically. There was a little bit of magic in the room. There's a big tradition of like of thinking about or associating blues music and sort of musical virtuosity with you know selling your soul to the devil at the crossroads and all that sort of stuff that we haven't really go into. Yeah well it's Robert Johnson is supposed to have sold his old to the devil and that's how he got the secret of the blues but also for example Paganini the late 18th Italian violinist who is basically the first great virtuoso of European music was also said to have sold his old to the devil. Well, it's true. Well, there is a very long association of music, the power of music to alter people's emotions with magic with an idea, you know,

with some ideas, you know, those things that seems related. And also those things are both often related to power to seduction, to the power that infatuation and romantic love can have over people, like all these things which in some ways were to trouble the idea of the rational self have historically been associated with magic. And that's, I mean, that's partly why, like, from the late, from the early 20th century onwards, advocates for magical practice have kind of retroactively construed, like even ancient magical practice about which, you know, we only know really what was written down by mostly male, kind of, you know, elite class, philosophers as having perhaps been better understood as kind of radical or subversive practice

precisely because, you know, it's about playing with affect, playing with the body, you know, playing with emotions and the unconscious in ways that a kind of rationalist tradition of philosophy and a kind of male-dominated tradition, an elite-dominated tradition, have conventionally, have conventionally, you know, disregarded and seen as sort of negative, had been hostile to. I mean, my understanding of the current historiography is that the wave of kind of writers about magic in the 20th century who saw it as a kind of historically radical practice are currently thought of as themselves having been engaged in a bit of wishful thinking.

There isn't a lot of evidence that anybody really ever thought about it that way themselves. But, you know, that might just be a kind of episode of revisionism. I don't know enough about the history to know if that's true but that is really interesting in relation to music as well because certainly, I mean it's something I'm always telling students you can go right back to Plato and find philosophers saying music is just bad for you and it's bad for you because it can kind of mess with your head

in ways which are related to are explicitly related to some idea that feminine experience is about kind of emotion and the body and male experience is about reason and the brain. And, you know, the idea of magic as maybe something, as actual magical practice is something you might want to investigate in the 20th century and subsequently is often connected to this idea that, well, the Western tradition has consistently since Plato has marginalized and denigrated music and emotion and the body and women and people who aren't,

you know, white European and people who are not members of the social elite. And, magical practice, because it is denigrated by those people and is associated with those marginal groups and experiences, might be something we would want to celebrate and explore. It might be something that's really powerful. I mean, you know, the problem from a left perspective is there's very little evidence. The magical practice has actually achieved very much for any of those marginal groups. The historical record seems to be that if you're a member of a marginal group, But what you want to do is acquire a scientific understanding of the world, enter into collective struggle with other members of your marginal group

and take state power. So, I mean, that's partly the dilemma, isn't it, of looking to magic as a solution to marginalisation. There's not much evidence, really, that it ever has been one for people. Just to go back to this sort of like history of like beliefs in magic, etc. Or 20th century history of belief in magic, One of the things that happens in the 1970s and into the 1980s with the birth of things that then become called chaos magic, et cetera, is that like people are really concerned to strip out the religiosity, which surrounds those sorts of magical practices around the beginning of the 20th century, like around Theosophy and Alistair Crowley and these sorts of things. Well, not just then. I mean, the whole notion of separating magic from religion, I would say, it's a complete 20th century invention. It's a complete invention of the 20th century. And it's really, it's one of the most interesting things. episodes in that history, I think. Okay. This is starting to make more sense then now. Because all while the two of you were speaking, probably for the last few minutes, I was thinking, this to me sits in the realm of spiritualism, belief, totems, all of that area. And it's, you know,

I'm feeling like I won't see the Venn diagram. Like, where does magic fit in with this? And you saying that clarifies it for me, Jeremy. So, like, the idea that you're talking about in Western society separates these things out. The idea that belief and religion is one thing, and then magic is this other thing. Can I just talk to the Grey's other thing?

No one interrupt me for five minutes, right? Fine, yeah. So, like, yeah, so that whole chaos magic thing about stripping out religiosity and it's supposed to be a focus on like what works practicality what works and it doesn't matter what what's causing it sort of idea basically and so I was talking to my friend

Garif Brown who was really involved in surrealism and like occultism and surrealism really overlapped in the sort of like post-war period there was this sort of turn to occult sort of practices by people like Breton etc and he was saying look you know one of the ways in which people work this through is like is to or work that grey zone through Jeremy

is that they sort of say, well, let's not think about it as in, do we believe this is happening? And we can think about it as supposing instead. It's like, if we suppose that this is happening, what does it do for us? Do you know what I mean? So that's the way in which you can deal with that grazen. So if we suppose that there are some magical forces in the world, and if we do this, we will inculcate them. It doesn't matter if they're there or not. We can put that to one side because we can sort of observe the effects that take place in us.

And, you know, I got to admit, when I'm sort of looking at or reading about what people are doing, what the time is just sort of, it seems to be like, you know, psychological preparedness, but with a little bit of trying to disorientate yourself, so it seems a bit weirder, etc. But, you know, I think that's one of the ways in which that sort of gets worked through. And I think that's useful for us to thinking about why does it happen in the 70s and 80s, basically. Because I think that this sort of form of magical thinking, like it hasn't disappeared. it's sort of like stop being called magic or in some cases it has stopped being called magic

but like you know it's pretty dominant at the moment if you think about something like the cosmic right and Trump you know you can see both sides of this sort of like this thing about belief basically I Trump is like a real really really into positive thinking he used to go in I think he might still do I used to go to Norman Peel's church so Norman Peel was this person who made a sort of Christian positive thinking sort of religion, basically. And so Trump is really, really, really into that. And you can think of that as like a pretty cynical kind, sincere belief of, and then on the other side, the people around Trump

are playing with like meme magic and this sort of stuff and this sort of like, you know, trying to disrupt belief, basically, you know, pretending to believe one thing, then we're going to play and believe another thing. It's a good point about sort of the irrationalism and the magical thinking of American Christianity. I mean, arguably, there's a good argument, the sort of of American Protestantism, it's a completely distinctive religion that's emerged over the past few decades, and it does have all kinds of magical features, actually. There's this belief in supernatural intervention in the everyday world, there's a sort of pantheon, there's the belief in Satan, there's a sort of evil power in the world. I mean, scholars of religion and science,

but especially scholars of religion, are obviously always arguing about what is the definition historically the definition of magic. What's the social definition of magic? Because if you go back like a few hundred years and certainly you go back to ancient times, then most of what we would think of as magic looks just like what is standard

conventional religious practice. It is you use certain kinds of ritual to try to persuade supernatural entities, the gods, to intervene in the world or in the cosmos on your behalf. And you know, you go back to sort of of the polytheistic religions of, you know, the Mediterranean are the ones we know most about in the West in pre-Christian times. And that's just what everybody does. I mean, that is just

religion. It's not just religion. It's also connected to your general understanding of how the universe works and how you might or might not understand or intervene in it. And sacrificing to the gods, trying to get the gods to do things for you is just completely normal. That's how you, as I say, that's how you relate to the world. And for me, probably the most persuasive scholarship on even what separates magic from religion in that context, is it's just, is that magic is still usually taught about something bad, even in sort of ancient times, like Babylon and then Greece and Rome. It's usually taught about something bad, but basically that what makes it bad is just that you're, it's just that you're engaged in some kind of

ritual practice, which is trying to invoke supernatural entities, but it's illegal. There are legal, there are always legally on social codes determining what forms of ritual practice, which supernatural entities you can try to enter into relationships with, what you can try to get them to do for you. And some of those things are okay and some of them are not okay. And it's the ones that are not okay. They get classified as sorcery or magic or witchcraft. Yes, this is an interesting point. And that's pretty much the same, right up through the Renaissance and up into the early modern period. And the question of what exactly, what forms of ritual practice will get classified as illegal or immoral or irreligious, and which ones will be considered within the

general purview of acceptable religious practice, obviously varies massively over time. it's not just the stuff that women do is it that's magic and bad well that is really interesting that's interesting because the thing that many people will know most about I think you already alluded to Nadia was the witch panics of the late sort of late medieval early modern period so this specific idea that

there are these people called witches and they're probably mostly women although actually at the beginning of this in the 15th century they're not mostly women They're usually aristocratic men who you have a political problem with, and later on it becomes that it's mostly women. And they are engaged in something called witchcraft, and that is understood to be essentially entering into some kind of ritual

and formal relationship with Satan and demonic forces in order to get power or riches in the world. And that is considered very bad, and it's assumed that there are these organized networks of these people. And there is kind of intermittent persecution or prosecution of individuals who are accused of witchcraft, and then it really escalates over the course of the 16th into the first half of the 17th centuries. And it culminates in the notorious European witch trials in places like Spain and Britain, which end up, say, in the early 17th century in Britain, they're heavily focused on women.

It's usually women, usually older women, usually women who are seen as being some kind of economic burden on the community, who are persecuted for witchcraft. And then there's this historical theory proposed from the late 19th century onwards that the witches who were being persecuted were actually members of some ancient pre-Christian religion which had survived the Christianisation of first the Roman Empire and then Europe more broadly.

And they had survived as this sort of underground religion engaged in some kind of pre-Christian religious practice. and that that was what was being persecuted, that was what was being suppressed. And in fact, that historical theory was so widely disseminated and so widespread and sort of unchallenged for several decades, lots of people still think that's true. But I can tell you that no contemporary historian thinks that's true. It's just, it was a nice idea, it was a nice theory,

but it was a theory that really came out of studies of like a sort of indigenous beliefs, in the kind of imperial colonial world of the late 19th and early 20th century and this belief that there must have been something like that which explained Richcraft and there's no there's no evidence for any of that so and it's not really it there are these kind of periodic you know revivals of interest in things like astrology or alchemy etc but it's not it's really only in the modern period it's really only from the kind of late 19th century when this at the same time as there's this huge technological revolution going up with the invention of like telephones and powered flight and cars and cinema

and all this stuff, which I think in some ways is part of the context actually. I mean, apparently my granddad, my mum's dad who I never met, you know, he died decades before he was born, used to have a saying. I mean, he was a man of the mid-20th century, which is whenever people would talk about things like the occult or magic, you'd say, well, or ghosts, he'd say, well, if you've seen, if you can believe television, you can believe anything. because he was of the generation he saw television for the first time. And there might be, and there is some sort of cultural, there are some cultural historians who see it in those terms.

They think that actually the invention of things like cinema and sound recording and telegraphy and telephony are so kind of uncanny. They're so weird that they mean that people just start to, people just think, well, anything might be true, actually. If you can do that stuff, people do anything. That makes sense. And it's only really with the development of things like the, the philosophy, the the Theosophists, you know, the Society of the Golden Dorm,

these kind of occult research organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, that you really get people who start to talk about the idea of themselves being magical practitioners, not as something to be sort of secretive about, or be ashamed or to accuse other people of doing, but you actually get people claiming that they're engaged in some sort of magical practice. And from what I know about the kind of scholarship and historiography, on this. I mean, part of what's going on is that lots of texts from like the late antique period, from like the 5th, 6th century, where what people are mostly concerned with is certain

kinds of mystical experience. They're trying to cultivate a relationship with God, in a way, which is pretty familiar to any practitioner of mysticism today or people are really into the kind of yoga I was talking about earlier. But they're being interpreted in a more modern, according to more modern ideas about what magic might mean. And then, over the course of the, from the early 20th century with the activities of people like Alistair Crowley and then later generations of modern occultists, you get this idea that somehow magic is a kind of ritual practice which can invoke cosmic forces to create effects in the world or on individuals, but is set, and that idea becomes separated from

the idea that what you're doing is you're sort of communicating with gods as kind of real entities and that sort of becomes central to the magical practice from the mid-20th century. Because what you also get from the 30s, 40s onwards is the invention of modern paganism and religions like Wicca, which are claimed by some of their founders, especially in Britain, to be direct continuations of ancient Bronze Age or fertility religions, for example. But no historian takes those claims seriously today. I mean, the general consensus is that modern wicker witchcraft paganism are invented in the 30s and 40s. And most modern pagan, most contemporary pagans accept that.

They accept that there's no historical continuity between the practices of the druids or ancient pre-Christian polytheists and contemporary religious practice. But they see themselves as engaged in a sort of spiritual practice, which takes inspiration from the knowledge that people, were practicing something comparable to what they're doing to thousands of years ago. And that's, you know, I wouldn't condemn anybody for doing that. But you can see on the basis of all these contexts, then by the sort of 60s and 70s, you get people who are really interested in these sort of ritual practice, forms of polytheism. And there's a very, as we keep saying, there's this really increasingly blurry zone between people who might really want to kind of pick a god and worship them in a kind of devotional way

and people who want to strip out any sort of devotional practice, even from the forms of magical practice which they would see is largely psychological in nature. And then in the 70s, yeah, by the 70s you get the emergence of things like chaos magic, where people are wanting to use magical techniques of visualization, of sort of what we might, you know, trance, of ritual invocation of imagined, you know, supernatural entities in order to, with, in order to have certain effects, either on themselves or on the wider world or on the people around them, and they are wanting to strip out any sort of religious or devotional aspect from that. But then if you think about what's involved in that, it's probably not surprising that, for

example, I mean, the key, most of the key figures involved with the thing, emergence of things like chaos magic in the 70s, like politically they were on the right. They're associated with mostly with forms of right-wing libertarianism. Because, you know, the whole, they basically, they want to use all these techniques to either have effects on themselves or on the world and wanting to detach those techniques from any sort of a spiritual or mystical framework

is, you know, it's a very capitalistic sort of logic, actually. It's a logic, it tends to be very individualistic. And, you know, there's a strand of very deep individualism in that particular tradition. And you can associate it with a certain kind of Nietzscheanism. Alistair Crowley, one of the fathers of modern occultism is famous for his saying, do what that wilt shall be the whole of the law. You can understand all this also as just a sort of one of the many cultural responses

to people from the late 19th century onwards, realizing that the culture they had inherited as like Victorians, Europeans or Americans was completely arbitrary. You know, up until like the 7th, I would say about the 1880s, a member of the educated classes in say Britain or America firmly sees themselves as the inheritors of this noble tradition of culture which has come down to them from ancient Greece, you know, through the Christian tradition, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,

and sort of tells them what is true in the world and tells them what is good in the world. And then, you know, from the kind of late 19th century through to the experience of the aftermath of the First World War and the sort of crisis of imperialism and the emergence of things like communism, you know, people are much more likely to start being confronted by the fact, well, actually, all this stuff that we've been taught about how the world works and all to work, it's not just the only way of thinking about the world. Like there are loads of cultures around the world. There are loads of people around the world. And there have been loads of moments in history when members of imperial elites have thought they had all the answers. And then their civilisations just collapsed. So, you know, what is it all about really? And one of the solutions people come up with in response to that crisis is to adopt some sort of philosophy whereby, well, there is no such thing as truth. Everybody just should believe whatever they want to believe, whatever makes them feel good to believe.

And maybe, and then some people get into the idea that maybe you can deliberately organize your belief. about the world in a way that makes you feel good or has the effects you want it to have on yourself or the people around you and maybe things like magical rituals and borrowing bits of religion from 6th century Greece or you know ancient Egypt or stuff is a way of doing all that but but really on some level this is all the response to the collapse of any real but actual belief in in the possibility of objective norms or any kind of objective social or scientific truth. So that is one way, I think, of understanding all that history.

And then, you know, you would have to say, for example, in the past few decades, I mean, probably the biggest development in that history is like the reemergence of interest in things like shamanism and animism and forms of indigenous belief. And like there are loads of people now who do I-Huska retreat. And they firmly believe that the experiences they have on their, their ayahuasca retreats, like apparently communicating with spiritual entities, have some kind of a concrete reality, like beyond being mere sort of hallucinations. And that's another, that's a kind of example of those kind of beliefs.

But like Keir was saying, there's also, there's loads of people who really believe in astrology, even though modern forms of astrology have a best, a tangential relationship, even to the forms of astrology which existed. So before the 19th century, and there's loads of people who believe in like manifesting and positive thinking and all kinds of what we could call magical thinking are really, really widespread, especially in the States. I mean, they're so widespread that it's probably, we're not really living in a historical moment

when you can tell you that stuff is marginal. Right. I think we should play It's a kind of magic by Queen because I just love Queen, that's why. Do you want to say anything about why you love Queen? No. I mean, what is there to say other than the fact that I just, I grew up listening to Queen in my dad's car on holidays and Isle of White and I absolutely love Queen. I love the sound.

I love Freddie Mercury. I just love Brian May's guitar. I just think it's such a, it's funky is the wrong word, but I just, yeah, I love Queen. The day will do on. On sanity, is this the kind of magic?

It's a kind of magic. So I'm interested in this place that I'm interested in this concept of the gray area because, I mean, I would probably somebody who believes in I have a critical analysis of where that sits in culture, but in the same way as we talked about in the episode of care, that, you know, there's a part of what could fall under the catchment of self-care, which is just necessary to survive in the world, but then also there's an ideology and a culture around it that we can be critical of, kind of feel the same way about manifesting because I think, I don't know, I feel like there's a more scientific explanation to manifesting, which is that it's a catchment term for putting in place certain things in the world to achieve what you want. And it's kind of couched in this kind of mysticism of the concept of manifesting. But I don't know. I just feel like if you want to make things happen, I don't know, there's a self-actualization thing there, which I know is not sexy on the left, but I kind of really do believe in. And I don't see, that doesn't seem to me like

magic, because it's stuff that you've done. So it's like you, you act in the world. And then the manifesting language will say, well, the universe will give back to you. But it also makes sense within the world of, you know, talking about things like kindness and love and, you know, you reap what you sow, which are things that I definitely believe in. And I don't think they're magical, but maybe they are. Maybe this is magic. So I guess I'm interested in like where, what function it fulfills in society and ideology at the time, like what's considered to be magic and why, you know, like why there are certain trends and what we would label as magic as a pejorative and what would be, you know, it's magical, like in a, I don't know,

airy-fairy positive thinking way, I don't know. So is manifesting the same as positive thinking, or is it different? Yeah, I don't think it is the same. I mean, I think it exists in the same, like could exist in the same world. But if you think about it practically, like, I would approach this from a perspective of, like, why have these concepts come out in society now? Like, why are they fashionable? I don't know that much about the history, but what I know is that part of the reason my analysis is, part of the reason why these kind of conceptions or way of thinking about actions is actually about agency.

And this is where I think actually there might be a Venn diagram around this. I'm talking about Venn diagram several times today. But I think positive thinking on one extreme is this idea that you can just think you're well. into the life that you want. And I think where it's different to manifesting is, I think practically how manifesting is used is that it's basically saying you can make the things that you want to achieve in your life happen.

And I think that fulfills a certain function in society because there's a lurch for agency. People are trying to get control over their lives when they're overwhelmed by, you know, the dissolution of the social contract, of, you know, like stable employment and jobs and, you know, not understanding where the future is for them, etc. So it's this, it's this very appealing concept which can dip into, of course, the alt-right, but I would like to defend the idea that the concept that you can arrange certain actions in a row to achieve what you want and that might be like a career change or it might be that you want to go

live in a different country or it might be that you want a different kind of relationship with people or that you want to go through like a series of you know therapeutic experiences to be a different kind of person like those all require certain steps and I think there's a there's a way of understanding manifesting where actually it is just a practical program where it's saying if you if you It starts with, does start with belief. You have to believe that these things are possible that you can change or that you can change your life. And the way that you manifest it is by taking those steps. Now, if there is a school of thought that manifesting is just like, I'm just going to sit down and meditate over it and that's it. I don't think that's going to work.

Like from, I just don't believe that. That's not the belief system I subscribe to. However, having said that what I do believe in is the power of meditation and I have a meditative practice and the meditative practice is really important for me because it allows me to have a level of perspective

on my life and my actions and the decisions that I'm making and that helps me and that fulfills a function for me within that kind of world of like manifesting and like living the life that I want to live. there's a politics around that kind of getting what you want in life, which is very critiqued from the left, which I will then defend, because I think it's important that people are actors in their life and don't see everything as, you know, don't see themselves as sitting in the backseat of their life experience. Do you know what I mean? Does that make sense? I think that is the nub of it, basically. The nub of what we're talking about is, you know, what is the power of belief? Like, what are the limitations of the power of just belief?

that's like at the nub of the whole idea of chaos magic and the idea that basically there are practices in which you're trying to boil down intention or something. So really concentrate intention. So one of the influences on chaos magic is this sigil magic where you create a sign out of a phrase, basically. You boil down a phrase or a word that you want to, that sums up your intention

and you want to boil it down to a symbol, a bit like the symbol of prince, when Prince, Prince became no longer Prince, but the symbol previously known as Prince. You know, that's one of the influences on Chaos Magic. The other one is like this discordionism, this idea that like, you should really, really believe in something, but like you should really, really believe in another thing the next day.

Do you know what I mean? And it's like belief disconnected from meaning, basically. You know, I can sort of see how that fits into a sort of 60s, 70s sort of counterculture thing, where you're trying to disrupt these really solid sort of forms of belief, solid, immovable sort of forms of belief around that, in the sort of perhaps the Fordist era or something like that. And that sort of like practices around magic and around belief, etc.

Of course they can go in lots of different ways. But I think like, you know, that idea that like, you know, you can play with belief, which is this discordant idea, and Robert Anton Wilson was a sort of libertarian, he thought it's called himself a libertarian socialist at first, but then just a libertarian. etc. The problem with that is at the moment, every crisis we face, you know, we can sort of say it's caused by this idea that, you know, you can create a world through belief butting up against

like brute materiality if you want. Can you illustrate? Well, I'll start with like the cost of living crisis and inflation basically because like modern macroeconomics is in many ways it is very similar to sort of chaos magic basically. It's basically about, you know, central banks are tasked with trying to act on belief and expectations, trying to do certain things in order to change people's expectations about what the future is going to be like. So perhaps you put up interest rates just to give a signal to the markets as it's so that prices are going to be stable in the future

and then that will manifest itself and will become stable prices, etc. The problem is like the inflation at the moment is caused by something else. ultimately, you know, it's caused by the fact that we have this asset economy. And so basically it's like a tinderbox for any supply constraints. But the supply constraints, okay, it's a war in Ukraine, but it's also just climate change, basically, right? Climate change is this is brute reality that is causing inflation is going to cause higher prices. And that is not affected by belief, do you know what I mean? It's the same with like all of this sort of conspiracy theories, right-wing denialism, denialism of COVID-deniable.

of climate change, like there are brute realities out there which are not, which you cannot alter by belief. And that's what centrist theories of belief and, you know, magical voluntarism around that and like right-wing denialism and right-wing ideas that you can just believe, believe a world into being, etc. That, you know, you come up against brute, brute realities, which can't be, can't be changed. And one of those is that zoonotic diseases are contagious. That happens whether you believe in it or not. The other one is like the carrying capacity for carbon in the atmosphere. That's like the boiling point of water at a particular atmospheric pressure. You know, it's 100 degrees. That's, it doesn't matter whether you believe

in it or not. That's still going to take effect. Do you know what I mean? Well, the status of the relationship between belief and desire is important here, isn't it? Because when we use the phrase magical thinking as a pejorative, in kind of every day or political language, we're referring specifically to the idea that people behave as if something that wanting something to be true can make it be true. And then the great principle of scientific rationality, one of the great principles of scientific rationality, also what Freud calls the reality principle is the idea that just because you want something to be true, that does not affect whether it's true or not. The level of you wanting something to be true or not does not actually affect

its truth or otherwise. But is that true with the self? Well, this is the whole question. That's where the grey zone comes in. The grey zone comes in to the extent that, well, is that true? I mean, the ancient belief in kind of ritual practice and magic was that there were, it was also indeed, wanting to be true, he doesn't make it true. But you might be able to persuade the gods to make the thing you want be true without you having to have done anything else necessarily. You might be able to persuade the gods. Sorry to interrupt, but isn't this back to power again? Because can we just, there's a distinct thing there about like, if you're trying to make something happen, like, I believe, like I can't cook and I believe that I will be able to cook and then you learn how to cook is very different to I believe that a million pounds will fall from the sky or I will become a millionaire without making doing any work or I will win the lottery without like knowing the odds or whatever. It's just substantially different if it's within your power, scientifically within your power, to be able to make that thing happen. Well, I think that's true. I think that's right. But I think then the question of what is and isn't within our power or what it even means for things to be within our power. That raises really interesting questions that he raised earlier, Nardi, about the nature of intentionality and the nature of agency. Because, I mean, historically, there's a very blurry distinction between magic and mysticism. And so, for example, within the Asian sort of contemplative tradition, within the Indian sort of tantric, Vedic traditions and within traditions like esoteric Buddhism, for example,

there's this persistent belief that if you meditate enough, you will acquire certain sort of mystical powers, whether it's the powers of divination or flight or levitation. But those things are actually just a dangerous distraction on your path to enlightenment. And what it means to achieve enlightenment is not to achieve these mystical abilities to realize some of your desires,

but to simply become liberated from even having those desires at all. And that's simply to be at one with the cosmos is to have freed yourself from the illusion of selfhood and the desires that it produces. And there's comparable, I mean, certainly in the Western tradition as well, actually. Most of what passes for Western esotericism

and I call a magic practice today and from the early 20th century is derived from practices which emerged mostly in what historians today call late antiquity, the kind of later period of the Roman Empire, the sort of period that coincides of seiridhi Christianity. But most of those practices at the time were understood by the people involved with them, not really as magical, but as mystical. They were involved, that you were trying to commune with the gods, not for the purposes of achieving something in the world

or manifesting some desire, but because communing with the gods is the highest form of spiritual elevation that human can achieve. So in a sense, it was, again, it was about sort of losing a sense of yourself rather than acquiring a sense of yourself. And for me, I mean, from my perspective philosophically,

there is something really important about the idea that indeed, you know, the self is a construct, the whole idea of the individual self is partly a product, of capitalist ideology and liberal ideology, and that it's really, it's important to be able to sometimes can remancipate yourself from that by whatever means, whether that's through the practice of political solidarity and mutual aid, or whether that's through meditation or

whatever. And there's a continuity for me between all those things, actually, and that you're not just worrying about yourself, or you're not just trying to improve yourself, you're going beyond yourself in some deliberate way. And that sort of opening up to the, the cosmic, if you like, the cosmic meaning not just, you know, the sort of the mystical or the mystificatory, but meaning just the general existence of an infinite field of relationships that we're all inserted in all the time, whether we know it or not or like it or not. That is, you know, that's a really important part of existence. It's one of the functions of music, you know, philosophy, of art, you know, draw, you know, certain kind, all kinds

of practices that might involve drugs, might be playing games, like any, loads of the stuff we talk about. It was about this sort of opening onto the cosmic. And a perspective, a sort of perspective, which is open to those things, raises all sorts of really profound questions about the nature of agency. And it might be possible to cultivate a certain sensitivity to the ways in which you can individually or with other people around you also things about your life in ways that will have knock-on effect and have outcomes that you want. And at other times, it might involve simply acknowledging the absolute limitations on your age. You might involve just understanding that you simply can't change certain things.

Certain things are outside your control, and you'll just torture yourself if you imagine that they are within your purview. And I think often when people talk about magic or people think of the idea of a world being enchanted or disenchanted, or people think about things seeming magical or feeling magical, a lot of the time what they are referring to is this center. There is a whole dimension of experience which is outside that of, it completely, individualised, privatised, intentionality. You know, the kind of liberal, capitalistic model of the self and its relationship to the world is, A, you are completely separate from the world and everything else, and all that really matters is your private interiority. That's the site of authentic experience.

Yeah, which is an issue in itself. Yeah, like you said, this whole thing of like, am I authentic internal? And that's the, yeah, yeah, go on, go on. And then what it means to have agency in the world is for that rational, calculating, privatised to be able to make plans and then achieve its objectives, usually involving like enriching itself. And I think that there's probably, there are other ways of relating to the world within which that is, you don't, you don't think of yourself as just completely separate, distinct individual, you don't think of intentionality and agency simply in terms of, I'm going to formulate a plan for myself and realise that plan in order to acquire something

or achieve something. You know, you might think in much more complex terms. And often And I think magic and mysticism are ways of kind of, our ways of giving voice to or giving expression to it, some awareness of or some desire for an awareness of that much wider way of experiencing the world, which for me is fundamentally, it is about, you know, what I call, I've called it in some of my writing, I've called the infinite relationality of existence. The fact that everything is, everything is connected to everything else in ways which can't be ultimately enumerated or denumerated. Like we are all completely mutually independent with each other

and with everything else in existence to some extent in ways which can't be ever fully adambrated or counted. And that is, you know, it is a really important dimension of experience. And I think often, say, it's not, you know, one way in which people have historically thought about it is by personifying the universe, by the aspects of the universe, by thinking about it in terms of gods or entities or spirits. But from a certain point of view, you know,

those are all ways of confronting the sort of the limits of the individual. And those are all ways of thinking about the fact that to think of ourselves purely as kind of isolated individuals is really limiting and is really problematic. I remember once actually I heard some guy who was like a full-time yoga teacher. It's like a yoga monk basically talking about the concept of karma, for example. And his justification for the concept of karma, he said that people think karma means, you do good stuff and you get rewarded by the universe. And he said, he said, that's ridiculous. Like, what, you know, how would that even work?

Like, what would that mechanism be? You know, the universe isn't like a good parent, a parent, like handing out, you know, points to the, or a teacher who hands out points to you for being good or bad. But what it is is a way of thinking about the fact that in an extremely complex social world in which your actions will have constantly have effect on other people around you, which will then have, and their actions will have effects on you, in ways which you can't possibly actually map or predict or no.

It's a safe rule of thumb that if you do nice things and good things, then more nice good things and good things will happen around you, not because of some law of exchange that the universe applies, but simply because of the interconnectedness of people and their actions. And I found that really persuasive and a really interesting way of thinking about the fact that, in some ways, you know, the language of magic and the language of mysticism can be just ways of getting to grips with in acknowledging the sheer complexity of existence in ways which, you know, sort of individualistic thinking or, you know, 18th, 19th century

rationalism, you know, can't really get to grips with it in the same way. I think that might be a way to get back to what I actually do find attractive about the KLF, that their sort of practices. Well, I think there's two things going on. One of them, they're trying to point to the sort of magical things that is around money. You know, money is a fetish. What they were really burning was just pieces of paper up in that. Yeah, well, it's an important point.

You know, money is all just based on faith. I mean, it's something economic historians will tell you all the time. All money is actually government debt, in effect. It's effectively debt, which has been issued by the government. Credit, cred to believe. Yeah. No government in the world could actually pay back the debts that it technically owes by by having issued money, I mean, all paper money is effectively credit notes issued by government

and the assumption that not all of those debts will ever be called in at one time, because if they were, it would bankrupt every government. That's how money works. Yeah, it's also like I was talking about the central bank earlier, you know, people talk about, people use magical words to talk about what central banks do. They talk about things such as the confidence fairy. We need to get the confidence fairy going because we need to reinstall confidence in the markets and these animals spirits. Animal spirits, indeed. But like, yeah, so that's, In some ways, that's what's going on with the KLF burning that money. They're saying, look, you know, you're the ones who have got magical thinking.

We're sort of trying to burst that magical thinking and make you realize, you know, of course, you know, we probably can't live in a world without some sort of magical thinking, because that would be, you know, a world in which there is a, where there is complete understanding of everything, which is probably impossible. But the other way we could think about it is what I liked about, you know, the whole, what I like about the whole weirdness of it is that it's it's a way of like saying well look we need to re-enchant the world in some sort of way you know that's how we get through life I was reading a book by Ben Myers recently called the perfect golden circle it's just a novel

about a couple of people who are doing crop circles in the early 1990s and you know they keep these really strict rules about secrecy etc you know they never reveal what's going on or why they're doing it, just as the KLF never reveal, why they burnt that million pounds, why they're not quite sure why either. You know, it's a way in which what people who are doing those crop circles, or at least in the fictional version, they're trying to introduce a little bit of mystery into the world,

a little bit of enchantment, do you know what I mean? And beneath that, is that, there is a sort of truth that, like, yes, you know, the world is incredibly complex, you know, everything is connected, we are all connected, and, you know, we go through life of these illusions of a self, et cetera, the illusions of money and all these sorts of things, there is something there that you'd want to defend, I think. But of course, from everything is connected,

you can get these huge leaps of causation in which I find really suspicious, basically. Just because everything's connected, you know, on a quantum level, observation changes reality. And so then people make these leaps from that into, in that case, you know, we can have, you know, our beliefs will alter reality, on a different level of scale. It just doesn't work like that, I think. You know, it might work like that to a certain extent

for a certain period of time among social systems, but it doesn't work it when you get to the brute reality of like natural systems such as climate change. Okay, Susie in the band She's Spellbound. The album it's from is called Juju, which is a 1981 album. And Juju is a word, a kind of term meaning, kind of voodoo or black magic or Voodon. or something like that.

And the whole album is themed around this kind of horror imagery or imagery from horror films or references to black magic. And from 1981, it is really a founding document of the whole goth genre. And it is really interesting. It's a really interesting transitional record between post-punk as practiced by groups like Joy Division and Gang of Four and Goff, as it would come to be recognized in the 1980s. is absolutely a document of that moment in the first half of the 80s

when so interest in the occult and magic was, you know, seeping into the post-punk scene. In fact, I mean, Susie and the banshees are from London, aren't they? But, I mean, Leeds in particular, which was widely seen as being the kind of capital of goth in the 80s, at least for a while, you know, Leeds was a real centre of that post-punk interest in, in the occult and magic there was a really famous occult shop in Leeds and it was really one of the homes of chaos magic as well

so even though Susie and the Banshee's and Temple of Psychic and Psychic TV and these people were all from London Leeds for some really Leeds was a real kind of centre of this stuff and yeah you had bands like the Mission etc and it was all there was a social scene based around the phono

nightclub basically which was the goth central of West Yorkshire yeah well I can't remember the name of the shop I mean, I remember, because I mean, I haven't really talked about this on the show. Like, I was very interested in the sort of the idea of the occult in my kind of early to mid-teens. And then once I realized how much of it was dependent upon kind of forms of pseudo-religious practice, still, I completely lost interest. I remember saying to somebody, like, why would I, why would I, like, if you're going to go around worshipping gods, why would you worship these loser gods from like antiquity? Like, why not just become a Catholic?

And, yeah, but it's a fascinating record spellband. This arpeggiated guitar is they're sort of developing this sound, which had been developed already a bit by Joy Division. It's very, very distinct. You hear laughter, cracking through the walls, you're spinning. You have no choice. You hear laughter.

Cracking through the walls. spinning, you have no choice. Following the footsteps of a red dog, or we are in trost, spellbound. Following the footsteps of redone, all right, don't we are in chose. Spell bound, spillbound, spillbound, oh, oh, huh,

spillbound, spillbound, spillbound, spillbound, spillbound, spillbound. Another good record to play, again from the 80s, would be the classic MC 900 foot Jesus record. Truth is out of style, which, you know, it contains the lyrics. You know, we all create our own reality and is absolutely exploring that kind of those ideas like, you know, that we're informing both things like chaos magic, MC 900 foot Jesus. He comes out of that kind of American weird, weird culture. scene of the 80s, very sort of postmodern, self-consciously postmodern idea that you could self-consciously play around with identity and meaning and narrative and true. And it's a very funny sort of take on that idea.

But now you can share in my continued happiness. You will know the best for peace of all for masters of old and anything that you touch will turn to 14-carat-go. It's an easy, five-word sentence that's the key to all your dreams. But from now on, you don't have to worry about no complex scheme. Your life will be a simple game that you will always win. $3 that you spend, the bank will pay back 10. And I say, yeah, why don't he start to be going on the bush? One of the claims of the Marxist tradition, going back to the 19th century,

has been a claim that it's a tradition of thinking, which is completely scientific, it strips itself of all naive illusions, and that it's different from utopian socialism. It doesn't believe in the supernatural in any way. It's fully materialist. recognizes the inescapability of historical context and the limits they place on human agency. And over the years, you know, over the decades, that Marxist's scientific tradition has frequently been accused of not quite being able to capture something about the magical nature of existence. I mean, this is an important set of ideas for us on ACFM, I think, isn't it?

because partly the whole, our idea of the weird left or acid communism or psychedelic socialism, arguably it is just one iteration of ideas that people have been kicking around since the mid-19th century, which is the idea that a socialist, anti-capitalist politics might at the same time be able to be completely committed to certain kinds of hard realism of the kind Keir's been talking about,

and of the kind we'd all be committed to, while also acknowledging that there are aspects of human existence and even more than human existence, which mystical traditions, magical traditions, psychedelic culture, and all kinds of different sets of ideas and practices that we're interested in, are trying to get to grips with in ways which can't be simply dismissed. I mean, let's be clear, there's a certain tradition, there is a certain socialist tradition,

which thinks pretty much everything we talk about on this show, is just stupid. Mostly what we talk about on the show is a series of things which should all be dismissed as distractions from revolutionary practice, nonsentical mystifications of the hard reality of human existence and the bold historical truth that the only thing that will ever actually deliver

the kind of outcomes we'd all like for us, ourselves as individuals or humanity collectively, is disciplined, rigorously scientific revolutionary action. That is like a criticism which people can and certainly do make of us. And like the whole project on this show, you know, the flip side of that is that there is this, you know, there is a tradition of experimentation with things ranging from meditative practice to surrealist art pranks, you know, to, you know, raves or,

games or all kinds of other fun stuff, where people are trying to explore all these things in a way which don't completely depart from the basic idea that you have to understand the world scientifically and rationally in order to be able to change it. I mean, that's always the zone we're exploring in some ways, isn't it? We're always trying to explore the zone between just abandoning yourself to complete hedonism, complete self-indulgence, just complete neurotic narcissistic self-obsession. magical thinking as such, and on the other hand, denying that the things which people who are interested in, in things like magic, are actually real and important aspects of existence.

So I think, you know, from that point of view, I think we're interested in the idea, what she the Robotham, and apparently called in the late 60s, magical Marxism. I've never got from her what she meant by it, but apparently she and a friend proposed at some point in the late 60s. There should be such a thing as magical Marxism. And I think, you know, I think we're basically sympathetic to that idea, aren't we? It's a balancing act, isn't it? In one way, I want to puncture magical thinking, because a lot of that magical thinking is quite problematic and it's gone in problematic ways, you know. We haven't even said the word woo-woo. Yeah, woo-woo is done. Yeah. But like, you know, in another way, at the same time,

you know, we could give a much more generous interpretation to a lot of these practices, that they are like techniques in which people are trying to maintain some sort of openness, the complexity of the world. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that is right. Or escapism. Which one is it? It depends.

Perhaps, yeah, but like what would be the attraction of that as escapism? I think it would be that, you know, trying to maintain an openness to the complexity of the world, which distinguishes it, I think, from the sort of Richard Dawkins type attitude towards reason in which you know basically reason sits outside of history and sits outside of social structures and these sorts of things

you know. Yes I think that's exactly right that is the phrase openness to the complexity of the world. That is what we're interested in here and I think I mean part of the gambit of things like magical and meditative practice is the idea that openness to the complexity of the world is something that can be

cultivated. I think And I think, I sort of think it can, actually. I think, and I think at their best, I think techniques, I don't know about magical practice as such. I'm pretty skeptical, I have to say. I'm pretty skeptical about things like ritual magic as being particularly useful tools, but I can see why for some people they might be. I'm not even personally particularly interested in things like shamanism or kind of animism or, you know, Ayahuska. But I can see how they would be useful for people.

And I think all of these things are most productive. They are techniques for cultivating an openness to the complexity of the world. And I think that actually that openness to the complexity to the world is necessary for effective political practice, actually. I think it is necessary. Its necessity might only manifest itself in the sense that, well, once you have a bit more openness to the complexity of the world, you're a bit more mature, you're a bit more wiser, you're less likely to get angry at people, the inappropriate moments. You're more able to cope with defeat, etc. It might only manifest itself in those ways, but I think it probably does also manifest itself in like an ability to appreciate nature, like as Richard Seymour has been trying to explore in his most recent work, or an ability

to open yourself to the cosmic in the ways that Deliz and Guittari write about. So there is an interesting continuity between all those things. And I think that is really valuable. And I think the kind of manifesting. I think what Nadia was talking about as manifesting, I would say actually, that is also that ability to figure out how you might get something done, even in your own life, to effect change. I think

openness to the complexity of the world is completely necessary to that. That is the difference between being able to do something like that, and the effect change is even just in your own life on those terms, and the sort of nonsense of thinking that if you whisper it hard enough,

the universe will let you win the lottery. Because that is not about openness to the complexity of the world. But the affect is the removal of despair, which is what people are looking for. Yeah. Is that to be able to move, to literally move, you have to believe that you can move. Yeah. And so that's what I mean. And so there is a world, there is a place where we can find that doesn't just see things as, you know,

I am the individual atomized actor that exists in some kind of like, fishbowl of authenticity, but also understanding that it's understandable that human beings want to be actors in their lives. And, you know, the removal of despair through belief, then act makes sense. Like, I get it. You know, it's worked for me. My partner is now called Alice Nutter. She changed her name, basically. But when she first adopted that name, it was in that grand punk rock style of trying to evade the attentions of the Dole office, basically. So lots of punks called themselves by different names. But she chose Alice Netta because it was the name of one of the famous witches around Burnley, the Pendle witches.

And in fact, you know, Alice Netta was a historic person who, and the reason she was declared as a witch and burnt was actually a boundary dispute around property. She had, she was, she owned property. It was quite unusual for a woman, single woman at that time. All very interesting you say here, but recently Alice is, been doing some genealogy tracing her family tree. And it turns out that she is actually related to Alice Nutter. No way. Cosmic.

So Alice Nutter would be like her great grandmother. I think if you said great. That's magic man. If you said great six times or something like that. So that's either magical synchronicity or perhaps if you go back that far, everybody's related to everyone. I haven't worked out the odds. And that's important not to work out the odds.

so that we maintain an openness to the world on that bum shell.