It Could Happen Here - Occulture, Technomancy vs Tradition, and the Role of Magick in 2025

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Garrison talks with a panel of magicians at the Occulture conference in Berlin to discuss digital technomancy vs. traditional magical practices and debate the ability of occultism to shape politics and culture in contemporary society.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Wait a minute, Sophia. How do you know she's a cult leader? Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast. So we'll find out soon. This person writes, My neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals. And now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder.

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CallZo Media Welcome back to the It Could Happen here. Spooky special. I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween. I just got back from Berlin and had a very scary time at the Amsterdam airport. and will forever hold a grudge against the Dutch people. But in Berlin, I attended the 2025 Acculture Conference, which seeks to explore the relationship between occultism and culture.

My first Acculture episode, last week, gave an overview on the subject of a culture and talked with a panel of artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical currents throughout the conference. namely William S. Burroughs, the cut-up method, and the tension around generative AI. This episode will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference, the revival of traditional occult practices. Then the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine, and myself will debate the role of occult practice

in 2025, and the current ability. of occultism to influence and shape culture and politics. Now back to the panel. Fast forwarding to Saturday, there was another block that focused on LOMs and digital technomancy called Pop Magic Language and Reality Hacks. The first discussion was titled SIGILs of the Cyberspace How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with Pop Culture,

which was put on by a, A guy in a graduate program, if I recall correctly, specifically on internet magic and digital chaos magicians, who was based a lot of his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit and Discord. He gestured towards me magic and discussed what he called techno-pantheism, these forms of internet gods. I mean, his focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies and his focus on video games. and how video games work and their interactions with magic for digital anthropology,

which is, I think, why he was doing all of his research work via Reddit forums and other, like, solely through digital means. He had four categories of practices in magic and tech that he was specifically researching. And from the feeling of his talk, it does feel like this is pretty early on in his research work. The first was technological animism. The second was techno pantheism. The third was the idea of servitors, familiars, egregors, and topas, and the fourth was digital sex magic. Well, the third was digital sex magic,

and the fourth was just the miscellaneous categorization for other practices that did not neatly fit into those other three categories. Let's talk mostly about the tenets, techno-animism and the use of specially trained LLMs to act as intermediaries between uniquely, like magically generated entities, like people who believe that they're making autonomous magical entities like severators, which is a chaos magic term, which is basically this for-sourcing that a magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life. And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using LLMs, not

as a host or as a as a manifestation of the severator. It's like it doesn't live within the LLM but the LLM was being used as a translator to actually have communication between the magician and the severator, especially if the severator was not, you know, humanoid or did not use like human language. They try to communicate using the LLM as a translator, which I assume would come from especially training like a localized LLM. with traits that you would associate with your severator to make that communication match up with like the, you know, I guess I would say the personality characteristics of whatever magical being, which you believe you have conjured. The techno-animist idea is based around a modern

version of animism in which objects all have spirit, including computers, and a series of superstitions around trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is happy with you, that you you're chill so that the computer does not glitch or mess up. And there's various superstitions, like putting little Taiwanese snacks on top of computers in Taiwan. Or, you know, priests, both Christian and non-Christian priests, like blessing servers or computers, cleansing them, cleansing gundoms at an expo in Japan.

But this idea that, you know, technology just like a sword or a chain, care might have its own spirit and treating that as such. Also, you know, printers very prone to misbehaving. So maybe you should treat the spirit in your printer a little bit better to keep it in proper working order, that sort of stuff. The next talk, which was one of the most useful talks in this whole like AI discussion, the devil in my LLM, which was done by Karen Vallis, who is an AI engineer, who basically was explaining to magicians how LLMs actually work, was explaining these people who think that there's, or people who may think that there's some kind of like magical operation, there's some kind of like mystical

operation with LLMs or LMs are their own, no, magical entity, explaining how this, this is just a probability machine, how how the actual process of multiple. different pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with an LLM, which then produces, you know, changes in their responses. And specifically discussing the phenomenon of AI girlfriends who turn out to later, quote unquote, abuse their users. Like, how does this thing that's meant to be, you know, an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time? And she spent 30 minutes explaining how this, like, mathematically happens. And very, very theories on how this happens.

So way too many people like to think of these LLMs and generative AI as like Neuromancer AIs, because there's a through line between, you know, early cyberpunk from like William Gibson down to the CCRU and, of course, Nick Land and people like Curtis Jarvin and these ideas are just severe and growth. misunderstandings of like fictional interpretations of artificial intelligence really, which some of the theoretical stuff I've read about this comes from people like Amy Ireland who the talk itself discussed this idea of like the like AI girlfriend as like this very bubbly, beautiful facade where behind it is this, this, I believe they used the term shog off.

like that's a lovecraftian term as like the full manifests like unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been put into these models which I believe Ireland kind of equates to Babylon in a certain sense and the idea of the black circuit which is it's just the same idea of like the nice facade and then the horrible nothingness that is actually behind the image of it or the horrifying amount of potentiality which then gets like filtered through and yes and she specifically talked about how, like, when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity. You're talking to a probability machine and a multiverse generator. Specifically in the way that the LLM operates, there's near infinite number of responses that it can give, and each further prompt you do collapses alternate realities and produces specific ones and then have their own branching pathways.

And some of those pathways results in your MISA Mesa Death Note girlfriend, ending up hating you, and that could be due to a number of reasons. It could be because of the way that you're communicating with it. The A.I. could be picking up on a latently, like, abusive framework or language or styles of communication, and then mirroring that back to you. Or it could be a part of what she described as this Wallawegey principle that is similar to this, like, satanic, like adversarial occurrence. So this is the devil in my LLM, but this isn't like an entity, but this is that when a process gets started, an oppositional force also gets started. And that oppositional force may start taking over.

And this is all just based on like probabilistic outcomes. But it forms its own anti-Misa Misa Girlfriend. And sometimes that anti-Missie Mesa Girlfriend gains dominance in this probabilistic like matrix. I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this like, I think it's a very Christian idea of like, the devil as negation, like evil as negation. I mean, that's the entire thing behind the girlfriend thing, is that there's nothing behind there. There's no sense of subjectivity. It's just ones and zeros. There's literally a black void. There's nothing except like data. It's negation in like in this sense that which Waluigi is just everything that

Luigi is. Yes. While Luigi is, what if you take the good Italian plumber, who's kind of clumsy, and then you make the anti-Louigi. It still is Luigi, but it is the opposite of Luigi while still holding onto some of the forms of him. But it, you know, it is the, reverses the color, reverses the intention, reverses some of his behavior. is a metaphorical explanation to try to get people to decouple this from you know there is literally some external demonic force which is now possessing my LLM

as opposed to this being just a mathematical possibility built into the multi the multi futures that could be generated when you start interacting with one of these models that was I think very useful for a lot lot of the occultists and people like talking about AI is having that having that very very like a technical like non-mystical explanation of of how this works I don't know there's a lot of other like AI stuff was just throughout this mean like I think you know Burroughs was probably

the most mentioned figure and and AI similarly was was very very very haunting like I went to one talk about mystery cults and like the the history of of of mystery cults and initiation in which the presenter used AI-generated images to show what the mystery cult initiation process would have looked like, which he justified by saying this was quote-unquote appropriating Catholic styles. It's like a Catholic art, like, you know, like the Baroque style, appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves appropriated paganism. So it's this form of like revenge against the Catholics and using AI generated art to try to display this initiation process, though he complained that the AI

could not generate a naked initiate. So even in his use of this, it still could not give him what he wanted, but still displayed, I don't know, maybe, maybe like 40 images. Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his talk about the Mithras cults, the way, like, you know, the cultural anthropology behind it, but when he was like, oh, I have made AI images, and it's like, you could feel like the room turning. This was in the

Peter Mark Adams talk, a ritual and epiphany in the mysteries of Mithras. We did, like, skip most of the morning on Saturday because it was just an entire block about come. I'm actually sad that

we missed the, like, the two The two threads on Saturday morning, one was occult erotics, bodies, fluids, and transformations, which was a four-class set and discussion panel after about different fluids in magical workings, mostly cum. Which, this was a loss for all of us. No, we're bummed. I mean, this show has covered, you know, breaking come news before. And the fact that we could have learned about Babylon. the body 156 and the elixir 49 seminal alchemy and alienate in an agency water into wine and to come or not to come comparing two types of sacred sexuality is a real failure of journalism on my part and i do apologize i really believe that we should have lingered on each one of those titles seminal alchemy and alienated agency a cultural othering of the erotic body and i realized that i have failed myself and everyone listening

by not attending some of these panels. Hopefully they will have a recorded version that goes online by the time that the written report for this is finished, but I do acknowledge my failure. I am listening and learning, and I will do better at the next culture conference by prioritizing... Sex magic.

By coming to the talks. I'm just going to say you will truly address to come or not to come next time. You will be coming. You will be coming. I will be coming to the talks next time. Everywhere. We did not come.

Not this time. The Berosian current, as I have named it, the cut-up method, and digital technomancy could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of chaos magic. And by using this larger framework, we now have this larger chaos magic current versus, but not necessarily opposed to, this other, large current of so-called traditional practices, either British, usually Cornish witchcraft, neo-paganism, or closed practices like Haitian voodoo or that of like Romani magical practice. And these latter examples often have a more religious component or historical cultural component

than say, you know, your average chaos magic practitioner does. Chaos magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid to late 20th century, to take on a quasi-deconstructivist approach to occultism itself. A postmodern tendency applied to occultism, moving away from strict magical orders like the Golden Dawn, the dilemma, tradition, dogmatism, and coherent historical pantheons. This is evidenced in the chaos magic embrace of the phrase,

nothing is true, everything is permitted. Up to this point, our discussion of the occulture conference has mostly focused on this chaos magic side. So now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice. We've really not talked about the alternate current that was going on through a bunch of these, which was about more traditional practices of magic, whether these are extant traditional practices that are continuing, which on Saturday, you know, there was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's,

Kimbanda or, you know, ritual of power exchange amongst the newer people of the Kathmandu Valley. There was a lot of that going on. There was the discussion or there was the presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic and probably, you know, both classical Philema talks that relate to more modern reconstruction, British traditional magic and other paths, you know, we missed this. talk by dark mason which was which i've heard them speak before which is a lot of discussions about the imagery of dark man across different cultures whether that's like the man in black at the

crossroads or the way that that traditionally shows up in a lot of british folklore there was an entire thread going through that i personally really loved one of the few um historical magical talks that i got to go to about modern greek goatia because i think it really tied up actually what was a lot of the threads from many of those talks, which was that these are extant practices and not something that people need to recreate. I know you had a lot of other thoughts on this, Ryan. Yeah, sure. Throw me under the bus here. While you were attending the pop magic language and reality hacks, I was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian magic, and then attending Dr. Sasha Kaitao's modern Greek goatia,

syncretism, integration, and evolution, which I found to be among the most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional and folk magic practices. It was also largely like social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in that is the body of her work. So much of ancient magic as it exists to us, if it doesn't come from a reconstructivist. Well, there's two branches of reconstructivism. There's the magical reconstruction that we get from the Golden Dawn and all variants of the Golden Dawn afterwards through Thelemma and other modern magical practices. And then you have reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious

practices, which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship. Some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an understanding of ethnic purity. There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say, involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist. And this concept of goetia of Greek practical magic carries over into modernity that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground, and it is not in need of reconstruction, that when we look at the different branches or at least approaches that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as theurgy and Goetia,

we have that theory that persists in the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church, if you would like to see, and she's got a lovely article on this, about how to pronounce the vocees magiique, she's got a lot, very strong opinions about this that I really respect and appreciate. So everybody should go read this because there is a lot of bullshit on the internet floating around about how to interpret these and say these things that is really grounded in some terrible scholarship. And the third, that this concept of goetia, ietes, which is a kind of like medieval neutral term for magic iatheus, which is derived from goetia, is something that carries on in terms of folk magic.

There's no such thing also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock to some people, but instead that, again, the magical currents exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church and then in this continuation of folk practices in contemporary yates. And she gave the example of, like, you know, her mother-in-law and her daughter talking about these individual practices. But what's interesting, and a lot of this was also talking about the cosmology of the orthodoxy Orthodox Church, specifically talking about the pseudonysis and the formulation of the church. So the E. Atheist is a kind of like form of folk vernacular that has persisted in, you know,

village practices. The point is that it exists within community. And this is something that was also a theme that existed throughout the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism. And I think that this really came out in the last discussion we had. I think it's also something that's central to most political problematics that we're dealing about this is bridging the individual and the communal in this magical practice of creating realities. We will return to discuss the cultural and political role of contemporary cultism in 2025 after this ad break. Here we go.

Hey, I'm Kelpen, and on my new podcast, Here We Go, and on my new podcast, Here We Going again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like

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Well, Dakota, luckily it's I'm not afraid of a scary story week on the OK Storytime podcast, so you'll find out soon. This person writes, My neighbor has been blasting music every day and doing dirt rituals, and now my ceiling is collapsing. I try to report them, but things keep getting weirder. I think they may be part of a cult? Hold up, Sophia. A real-life cult? And what is a dirt ritual?

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Listen to Grace. Caves County in the Bone Valley feed on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to binge the entire season ad-free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I think one big question, we kind of discussed this a bit today and some of the talks like prompted this. today on the last day in which we're recording this. Like, why do people practice magic in 2025? Like, what is the purpose of all of this stuff besides the cool aesthetics, which might just actually be one of the main reasons why, right? But like, why do this, right? The ability to actually, you know, make art is pretty democratized. You know, culture is a globalized thing that we can

effect on the internet. It's music, film, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy. Everyone's a sort of intellectual now. Everyone has ability to enter into intellectual exchange. You can be self-educated. It's never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now? And like this goes into this, you know, question that someone asked at one of the very last panels is, you know, what's the difference between like a scholar and like a practitioner? I asked like a question about, you know, you know, what's the use of solitary practice, like a practicing magic as like a personal religious or like spiritual process or as a way to, you know, gain power in the world versus using occult thought to shape culture, you know, doing the occulture process, right, which is

this whole conference is, you know, ostensibly named after. And I think specifically talking about these like older forms of magic, like why are these important for occultists, like modern practicing occultists, which this conference is attended by, why are these useful to them beyond, you know, in anthropology or like academic sense? And I realize that is a big question. But, I mean, we ourselves attended a number of rituals this weekend. We went to an Abraxas ritual, which was sort of limited by the confines of the conferences setting. But, you know, a lot of these rituals were about in trying to induce some kind of like trance or meditative state in which images or thoughts would come into your head

and images and thoughts or feelings that you ordinarily wouldn't feel in day-to-day modern, busy life, right? And this is a form of why people do these practices, but I guess we can, I don't know, but based on the panels or talks we've attended, go around and discuss why this is a thing that is worthwhile to these people,

but also the sort of tensions that we're feeling at, at an event like this. I mean, the question, why do people get into occultism? I think there are as many answers as, like, practitioners themselves, really. Because, I mean, you know, partly it can be a cultural tradition, and you have, like, a communal or societal lineage that's just, like, part of the culture. Others who are more, I suppose, more secular are looking for an escape from, like, mundane,

secular society others like you said want power I mean if I have to speak for myself I always find that I come back to the phrase it's about creating relationships with the world and you know there's like an essence of

like enchantment to it but it's like also being able to recognize like you know occult's like movement or like the secret secret sure the the secret elements that make up reality or like Like the vibe, like the vibes of a place can be like something you connect with and you can kind of give some cultural, cultural shape to, I believe, like the genus loci or like anything that's very, I mean, it is a very vague thing to ascribe to, right?

But like it's about, again, like creating relationships with the things inside the world itself. I mean, my definition of magic, which I've used for the past few years, is that magic is the manipulation of meaning. And that can be internally for you, like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, other people, the things you interact with. But again, and also be this, like, a cultural form that you're creating meaningful correlations for a cultural capacity. Yes. Or as a way to affect culture. And I think, Probably the best talk that I attended this whole conference was by Tom Banger, who is a former member of the Temple of Psychic Youth.

The North American Temple of Psychic Youth specifically. But he gave a talk about how he is dying of brain cancer. And the various rituals he's using throughout this process to feel like he's gaining some agency or control over his thoughts in this matter. He's not rejecting the reality as it is, you know, increasingly evident in his life, but he can control how he frames it. And he specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief, that magic is a is a bargaining with the world, and that it can change your, you know, feelings and associations with the things that you experience, even if, you know, the certain end results might be generally going in a direction. that you have a limited ability to influence. And this is, you know, a guy who's historically,

and you know, been affiliated with some of the original, like, a cultural projects, right, of shaping what counterculture is, like what we think of as, like, counterculture. This is a person who's been heavily involved with how counterculture, as we currently understand it, has existed since the 80s. And now he has a very, you know, personal, magical outlook, based on the, as he said in the title of his talk,

the proximity of Thanatos, the god of death. So, Garrett, to answer your initial question, this is something that I have been thinking about a lot too and engaged with this question every time I attend one of these conferences. And I think, I mean, just again, training, I can't help it, but in Max Weber's science as a vocation

is where he lays out the thesis about the disenchantment of the world. And we can think, of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of the very human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the experience of place, and of the connection that exists between people. And one of the things that the best of magical practices does

and being in magical community is to give you a conception of time that is other than one that is based in productive capacity. You hear magical people who go to these conferences talk about, now I have to go back to my ordinary life. And their ordinary life, they will tell you, is their nine to five job or the push to go to school or some sort of like productive capacity. So this is a moment of like unbounded time where they get to experience something as fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on whirling magic by

an Egyptian woman who used to live in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance and body movement and is an athlete and explained Sufi principles to us, but taught us really the basics of body movement and how twirling can be used as a meditative practice. We got into a room. She taught us the basics of like certain kind of like spotting foot movements, but the point was is that it was a very embodied movement that made us experience body and time and place and relationship to other people in a fundamentally different way than we would have otherwise. And it seems that the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations I had with attendees, I have to say probably like eight of ten of them, as I talk to, would bring up this concept of

I just, I want to live in an enchanted world. And I think the project of magic is to re-enchant the world. And there's a certain romanticism with that that I'm sympathetic to, but I think that we need to think about this in more of a radical way. And I think that that's the desire that people have as an experience of time other than we have. You talked about magic as your definition of magic is the creation of meaning. Manipulation of meaning. But part of this is the magic or the conceptions or whether you think of this as an embodied practice or just purely metaphysical or transcendental is that it affords the individual,

the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to the creation of meaning. So there's a certain amount of empowerment. Like I'm hesitant to take this down like the kind of like live, laugh, love, affirmations path, because we could do that very simply, that this is just a spooky version of that, mindfulness and these kinds of things. And for the new age element, that certainly is a major through line across, you know, portions of this community, maybe not as much for this conference, but for other, other, you know, esoteric or, you know, woo-woo conferences, absolutely.

It's, like, a major aspect. And, I mean, towards the end of the conference, another thing that really highlights, at least my argument that it is about time and body and space and place and connection and experience. these things in fundamentally different ways than our daily life, there was also a conflict then between individual practice and what it is that we collectively do when we think of magic as a process as either chaos magicians or culture jammers or, you know, thinking of this and kind of like, you know, the Temple of Psychic Youth approach to magic as putting things out, whether those are products or those are art or those are performances or those are words

or that's borough standing in front of a cafe getting it closed, which it effectively did close, is that there's a desire for people to exist in community and have connection in community with others. And you do that through conceptions of time and body and space and place and connection. So this is really how I understand the desires and the practices that people engage in when they come to these conferences. And you can see it in the way that they can.

kind of like closed, the elation that they have and what they have accomplished and they have done. And you can see that there's been a process of meaning that has been created through their various experiences. So, I mean, that would be my brief summary. I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was specifically about a culture because I thought it really hit on some of this. It was mostly talking about the way that the occult has influenced art and art has influenced the occult, how artists end up using the metaphysical, whether they are trying to do depictions that they can communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas or connections or contacts that they make. And one of the speaker's examples was of Gustav Klimt, or whether or not

they are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult concepts and ideas. and explore them through visual mediums. And so, you know, like Alan Morris Promethea or The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. And I think he really got into a little bit of the tension there because of an artist as a seeker. And I think this also dives into a lot of the people who are at magical conferences is whether you're there as a seeker,

which, you know, what are your needs, what are your desires, what are as that? but then as a dweller, are you creating as part of a community? And everyone who came to this entire conference wanted to create as part of a community or wanted to be part of a tradition or feel like they were part of a continuous thread that is both creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways and able to communicate that to others who are also trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas or existing ones even, but just that continuous

thread of both creation and disseminating information back and forth. And I think with magic as well, a lot of people might get into it for a personal reason. But I do think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with people who are professors in ancient history, giving lectures on specific things, you're not necessarily just at the level of being a personal seeker anymore, because you are trying to find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking, you'd meditate in your bedroom. But you're trying to find a larger thread

and a way of influencing the world around you and also letting the world around you build those relationships and influence you and you are trying to take an information to synthesize into something that is more than just an idea you have, but something that you can continue to communicate and use that to continue the conversation with the world,

with other cultists, with other, you know, in this case, historians and academics as well, and bring those threads together and create something new out of it. What new thing are they creating? What do you mean by that? I think it gets into the idea of a culture that was both, you know, one of the beginning talks of changing reality, but also at the end when they're really going into how... A lot of this stuff isn't about new things, though, or generating new things. It's about trying to, quote-unquote, keep the old things alive or, like, regress back into these, into what they perceive as these older practices, which may be somewhat manufactured

older practices, in which case, it kind of, it is a new thing, but under this, like, this mask of, you know, like, like, ancient knowledge. There is certainly people who do want to generate this, this new thing. I think there is a lot of people that are interested more in this, like, I don't know who's the larger group, but I think there is at least another group of people who is interested in this, like, the amount of times I heard people talk about, you know, trying to keep, like, the flame alive

and talk about these, like, old traditions that they're participating in simply to, like, keep them going. I'm not criticizing that necessarily. But that is also another, another, like, aspect of it, which I think has very limited, like, I think some of these people have very limited goals and actually, like, influencing culture, and frankly, like, kind of want some of this stuff to, you know, remain, you know, hidden in that they view that as a more, like, you know, original or, like, stable version of, of magic and are even frustrated by, like, this, you know, capitalist commodification of occultism and how that's, I think the word was, like, the banalization of, of magic as you, you know, think about how much of our, of our pop culture is influenced by, by, uh, esoteric. concepts or imagery from, you know, Lord of the Rings to people mentioned today, you know,

the Adams family, Harry Potter, video games like The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, even stuff like Twin Peaks, I mean, other stuff like The X-Files, Dr. Strange, Dr. Fate, you know, comic books have a heavily occultic influence. And some attendees verbalized a kind of frustration at that. true but a humongous portion of every evening was movies and music and rituals and performances that people are also doing based on this and they are trying to integrate these concepts in and then perform them there to show their inspiration to show it as to stir conversation to trigger some either sense of the sublime or communicate some sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten out of this to other people, whether it was through music or through the incredible art that there was in all of the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking. So the creation aspect of it was very, very tied to the entire event. Yeah, certainly. I think one of the biggest manifestations of this thing you're talking about is in music. Could, like, throw a stone

and it'd be hard not to hit an occult musician in my life, I guess. I'm guilty of this, yes, I know. The occult filmmaker even does have some like contemporary autours, I guess, if you consider like Robert Edgars or people who are influenced by esoterica who are making a big budget Hollywood or, you know, 824 style of popular films. Yeah, certainly in music, I mean,

it was like the main performance outlet in this conference was the theatrical musical performances. There was very, very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs, I'm afraid. Perhaps to respond to this, too, I think it's important that we actually look at the kind of composition of conference goers themselves. Naturally, there's going to be solitary practitioners that, you know, come in or dabblers or people who just, you know, like spooky things or musicians, these things. But we also have, you know, those who are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are reconstructed of authentic or not in the OTO, or in, you know, the Golden Dawn or other kind of orders. There's reconstructionists that are actively attempting again

to keep that flame alive or to go back and to reconstruct. And then you have these chaos magicians. These goddamn chaos magicians, which, like, this is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I have been having this entire time because they explained some aspect of chaos magic or I tend to panel and my response, you know, and again, I understand my complete bias here,

as I just like, well, that's fine. Why don't you just do ancient magic? We do the same thing. Why don't you just do ancient magic? It's the same thing. And I think that that's actually one of the difficulties here is that there is a kind of, you know, magical grammar to older practices.

It is like, you know, if you look at the PGM, it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple things together that works. But the argument that, you know, to go back to my favorite talk, or one of my favorite talks on the modern goatia, is that if you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a closed one. You have to be in orthodox, like, you know,

the Orthodox Greek church and have a yaya who's going to, like, teach you these things and, you know, speak the language. And so that's closed or be a member of a voodoo house, but that requires initiation and, like, cross-cultural contact and, like, engagement and a high level of, like, language skill and ability and money, for that matter.

Yes. And most people don't have those kinds of things. So, you know, there, I, what, those damn chaos magician, I find are the ones who are actively engaged in the process of the creation of the new and I think are probably more close to the heart of this concept of a culture

because they engage with it in a way that is interestingly very anthropological or at least the best of them are dealing with it in a way that is very anthropological and I have some sympathies there and then there are some other ones that I just don't quite understand but that's a story for another time.

The talk that you were referring to, there was two talks at the end that were particularly worth. the, well, a lot of them were, all of the ones at the end were worth, but Francesco, Peranos, the occulture, the material cartography of contemporary spirituality and the arts, where he talks about the two different approaches to studying a culture. And he talks about the values and limitations of both, and you need an, you know, add mixture of them both, but basically there's the sociological aspect and the media

studies aspect, which is the more academic of the two, which involves basically what he argued, a secularization of the occult, and this really, counts for the diffusion of like occult symbols and practices into music, into culture. The Adam's family is the example of that. And then the second strain is then religious studies. So the religious injection, or injection, excuse me, into art of these sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went over some limitations.

That was particularly good. But he breaks this down into basically five areas where you have the conception of art high and low. Mediatization versus mediation of arts. He gives the example, this is where the Morrison comes in, but he gives the example of the mediatization as Somerset Maas, the magician based on Crowley. But again, this like, this diffusion of the figure of the magician, completely separated from like any actual magical practice, but just like the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into the secular culture. And then, this example of mediation, this messianic approach, as he described it, Grant Morrison's

comics as a gateway into reality. But this also, I think, that Gary carries on to your question that you asked towards the end about Twin Peaks, the return very specifically. You also have then the metaphysical ontology versus the performative anthology, which Elaine talked about, the intention of the author, the perception of the audience, and then the artist is seeker and the artist's dweller, which is also what you talked about, too, this difference between the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, the artist who really inhabits that tradition, which again made me think about the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology. And I think of the example of a very famous book called Mamma Loa, or Mamalola, excuse me, by Karen McCarthy Brown, which is in

ethnology, looking at voodoo practice in a very specific house in New York during a time period. Karen lived with Mama Lola for a long time, but really importantly, eventually Karen became a member of this voodoo house. I think I can say

that. I don't think I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but it's in the book. No, it's not in the book. Oh, okay. But she represents a very interesting approach to that like anthropologists going native, but this was the question that was asked towards the end

like this difference between the academic observer of these things versus the practitioner. And I think that that really gets to the heart of what it is that chaos magic does and the occultial practice. That is that you are producing culture and you're very specifically producing this magical occult culture. So it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like two poles of the secular and of the sacred, of the magical. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself?

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I kind of, like, I guess, probably just close up my notes here, and specifically the stuff on Twin Peaks to Return. One of the last talks was by Jeff Howard, next stop, Universe B, the negatively existent ones, and Universe B in contemporary culture, which was discussing sort of like, you know, mirror, mirror world, underworld concept,

not in like the Greek sense, but in the occultism of the British occultist, Kenneth Grant.

And this would probably be most, most recognizable to people as the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks

is I think one of the better depictions of this sort of concept. It is a somewhat

limited version, but I think it gets at the, this is the kind of heart of the

concept in a way. And he gave this talk where he was explaining the risks and the great power that you can that you can personally achieve through contacting these negatively existent ones or like accessing the magical potential of this sort of like mirror mirror negative universe to our own and talked about a little bit of Derrida and various other stuff. But from the perspective mainly as a practitioner of love of like you know the the the danger and the and the benefits of doing this this sort of magic uh as written by kentth grant uh jeff howard did

discuss twin peaks and the use of kentz grants concepts specifically in twin weeks the return and i i asked him in the panel afterwards like how how how can you like balance these these these two forms of working with occultism or like like what what is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism, you have, on one hand, this practitioner aspect, where you're using it to, like, gain power or induce, like, limit experiences, like, induce, you know, religious or transcendental experiences that change your own perception of, like, sensory reality, versus the way that Mark Frost utilized Kenneth Grant's magical world in writing and co-creating Twin Peaks The Return, which I can argue is a much more effective

of use of magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts who, people who are never going to read books by a relatively niche British occultists, which are books which are actually very, very hard to find now, both, you know, getting going into the MOVE zone and accessing these non-existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus phenomena which are existent but lack any, you know, core sense of being. And how Mark Frost, as a non-existent as a not sure if he would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest in magic and the occult, more so than Lynch does.

Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism. But Frost's use of these concepts, I think, constitutes an effective contemporary version of magical practice, just as valid as chanting and meditating and closing your eyes. And in some ways, I would argue, even more effective because Twin Peaks to return has, existed as both like an evocative force, a force that can invoke certain, certain concepts or philosophies, quote-unquote, entities, if you will, as well as a tool of divination as Twin Peaks

the return forecasts American decline and the nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is just eating itself. And all of all of those things are major aspects of what that show is doing. uses Kenneth Grant's concepts to get there. And I think that is an occultural project, though. That's not a solitary magical practice where you're just meditating alone to try to induce some sort of vision. It is cultural. It's influenced culture. It is probably one of the most well-regarded artistic feats of the 21st century. That's a longer version of the question I gave. And the guy did give kind of an answer, which was basically just about trying to, you should, like, balance these two things. You should try to do both. You should try to engage as a solitary practitioner for

whatever goals you may have, but it would be a mistake to not try to use this in some sort of like a cultural capacity to like influence culture. But it's still that that operates on like this, I guess what I was trying to get it is like this similar to the to the scholar and the practitioner as a false dichotomy. I think this is the same thing as this a cultural version of what Frost is doing as opposed to a like an actual practitioner. I think what Frost's doing is using, it's kind of in a chaos magic sense, though not for, I guess, chaotic means, but he's using the contemporary tools of filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into the world. That is a more powerful

form of magic, because luckily that was distributed by Paramount Showtime, which certainly helped in the same way Fox News is useful or effective as a magical generator because of the reach that they have. But I think Frost is just as effective as a magician, if not more so, than I would say any of the people attending this conference. The other element, I think, of that the talk that Jeff Howard provided there, too, I think that, you know, again, I agree with you, Gare. But he also, at length, talked about Andrew Chumley. And specifically the rights of the amethystine light in the Azoasia, page 347, where he reviews a bunch of non-nowns and things that are there. And Chumley himself is responsible, founder of the Coltis Sabati, and is, you know, a contributor to

the revival of what Trucks's traditional English witchcraft, which is not necessarily a solitary practice, but it is, it is, it is, in many cases. Most of these English, witches are pretty solitary. They talk. There are, you know, treatises that they write and grimauds that are, you know, hard to get a hold of. I think they probably exist in PDFs, make good choices about how you get your digital content. But, I mean, again, that was the tension.

He spent a lot of time talking about that individual ritual, which, you know, you present Frost as somebody who is popularizing these ideas to a larger culture and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to, you know, not just meditate, but to think and engage with these concepts. Because of his work, you can think about, like, the allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that he fails and succeeds to navigate a strange and confusing world and affect change in the world in his relationship to women and saving women. And you can, you can use that as like an actual, like, you can refer to that as a concept. And that builds on some of the world building of grant. But now, you know, it's a cultural dialogue that we can have

about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer and how that, I think, can be a positive addition to culture by using occult elements. Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in 2004, that there's a limited number, it's been passed on, or you can get that PDF online, but who has the time to actually read through this. There's these cultural context that don't make sense. There's these concepts that it refers to in a clear network that requires scholarship for you to even do that individualized practice. That's a big ask for most people to start to think magically in a popularized kind of way and seems contrary then to this conception of a culture, which brings me to my,

the last talk by Carl Abrahamson, the meeting with remarkable magicians, which really tied all of this together, tied all of these threads together in a really interesting way as relationship with Genesis Peorridge, with Kenneth Enger. Anton LeVey. With Anton LeVay. But that was as another

interesting aspect of somebody who is doing practice and engaging in community and bringing people together. But ultimately the question, Elaine, that you and I talked about at the end was, you know, beyond the end relates immediately to what Gair was talking about here. Beyond the person,

practice in magic, what goals should a culture have and how can it incorporate its actual goals and ideas into the larger society with the same success that the aesthetics that, you know, have been incorporated into the culture? And I think one of the difficulties that you have there in this individuated practice is that when you look at a figure like Genesis Peoridge, you can see that there's a very clear project. When you look, and this is going back to the Brosean element, right? Is that there was a clear practice there. There was a clear kind of like a goal to change culture, whether that was just purely for

the sake of change. I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult of action for the sake of action. There was some kind of personal, political, radical project that we can go back and enumerate, that they enumerated at the time that was separate, I mean, that wasn't said immediately in the same breath as the, and now we do this practice. They did the practice. They did the art. And I think that one of the, my response to that, that question is, I don't see an articulation of a political or social project that is a tied to a culture in these practices.

There's a lot of, and this is a very academic practice, a lot of people coming into a room and asking, what would it look like if? And to ask, what would it look like if is not the same thing as let's do a thing. Let's actually go out and evoke change or this is the project. Now let's create a plan and a movement. Instead, it is this like nominalization process of predetermining ends before we even get there based on theoretical assumptions. And I think that that's contrary to the very idea of magic as praxis. Magic is doing something in the world in these kinds of veins. So that's the thing that I would like to see.

And I feel like that's something that was getting at. at the end, but that's the kind of thing that brings people together to think conceptually, to focus on an idea that we share and to discuss with one another. I mean, on that note, I, for context, I'm, well, still am, like, part of a chaos magic group called the Domus Keotica Marauder Underground or DKMU, who very much is about that. It's like, like, established in like the mid-early 2000s, if I remember correctly. But it is very much about this core idea of the assault against reality of, I guess, like, remystifying the world or, like, making weird shit happen through what they call the Elysian network with Ellis is like one of the goddesses of the DKMU. And it's very much like that sort of mix between magic, personal practice, community and like a somewhat unified but also decentralized, like occult war.

there's a political statement to it at the end, which there needs to be more of, personally speaking. Yeah, there was like some vague gesturing towards, like, politics beyond, you know, the mention of, you know, magic has a form of resistance in the, in the opening a little paragraph on the program that they handed out. But, like, there was specifically in the politics of tarot block, one of the talks about the history of the emperor and the herophant card, the speaker referred to the United States as having an emperor crisis right now, but that was kind of it. The rest of the talk was purely historical.

The talk before that was on queering the tarot, trying to free tarot from heteronormative readings and discussed a few artists. Discussed a few artists. who are attempting to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in the tarot or reflecting the tarot figures to be more representative of, quote-unquote, queer identities. That was kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which is, I guess, kind of lacking. As much as they want this to be a culture, they don't want this to be a political conference, it seems.

And I think, you know, if everyone, you know, in their talk had to have some section on, like, you know, communism or anti-fascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad. And that's not what we're saying. But, I mean, specifically, I think if they're naming this after Genesis Porridge, they were using a term by Genesis Porich, who had a very strong idea of why they were doing this work. And specifically, I was very frustrated in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to discuss that length. Some of them may have mentioned it, but discussed Genesis Porich as one of her core of occult. practices was on androgynizing herself. Pandrogeny project.

And like breaking and breaking gender, which they framed as an occult project. And yet, even people who she knew at the conference would only refer to them as a hymn through all the talks, including the last guy, Carl Abranson. Who wrote a biography? Yeah. And like this is, I do not think this was out of like, you know, malice. I think this was just a linguistic blockage for some people who may not even be thinking about what they were doing, but it shows like an actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose

of magic, or at least what I would argue that is and what I would, you know, suppose Genesis's pandrogyny project as a form of magic. But this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for, quote-unquote, resistance, since that's the term they're using, not not me, which kind of underlines this whole, this whole conference. I mean, I think the, the burroughs talk was probably the most, the very first burroughs talk, which we opened up the last episode with, is the most, you know, explicitly political one, talking about, you know, going against control, freedom in this, like, anarchic or libertarian sense, or, you know, revolt against monotheism, I suppose. Like, one of my frustrations as well is this, the constant mention of

the CCRU, which nobody ever went into depth on, which, you know, for all its faults, and you know, Nick Land being Nick Land was very much like a sort of like radical

cultural Marxists, like a project, right? It's like cybernetic Marxism mixed with like Crowley and some content, whatever, but it is extremely frustrating to see that sort of refusal

to engage with like the political stuff of it. Because like even before like psychic youth there was like Throbbing Gristle, Genesis bands that pioneered industrial music who I mean this was a bit before punk music but like

it very much played with like the same sort of shock aesthetics that like the early punks would wear swastikas where like throbbing gristle the logo is very much like a lightning bolt with like black and red and white. Genesis herself engaged in some of this stuff,

not from a fascist perspective, but from a provocative perspective, which I mean, you can certainly criticize psychic TV and her four, as many people have, but... I mean, shock value is kind of overrated nowadays with, like, internet, actual words. But I very much believe that occultism being this, you know, this collection of practices that have been very censored

and, you know, punished by like the church and such things and like I guess these systems of control where like I guess I take issue with like the oh it's like oh fun and all and and and light and love and whatever but the there's like a radical element to occultism and a radical possibility to use occultism to again like the whole like cultural like the idea between personal practice and cultural production right like creating cultural artifacts and and putting them out into the world, being very proactive with the shaping and the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities is a very potent thing to be, to do. And the sort of, I guess, like, liberalized

or like neoliberal idea of like the personal practice and like, oh, I'm changing my perceptions and all these things are fine. But it's more like self-suited. thing than it is about creating change into the world. If you're not actually changing anything, are you doing magic? Exactly. At least that would be my argument for like, for coming from the chaos magic perspective. This gets to another kind of trite and facile, academic, thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably 20 years at this point, I feel like at most philosophy and political

science, political theory conferences, where the question is not just what we would it look like if, but, you know, to think otherwise, you know, think otherwise than we have. And usually it's this how do we think other than we have, those kinds of things. And so it, I mean, again, magic, and as we've been talking about here, is meant to evoke change in the world, to cause change in the world in conformity with reality, if we're going to use, or, you know, with, with, with Will if we're going to use the Crowley, you know, definition here, which I think is fine, great. I want a goth girlfriend. Thankfully, you can talk to AI, but I'm worried that she might beat you. Or that you'd kill her like all my old tomogatchez.

But this is the issue that we are talking around, the conference and a culture has been talking around and the political problematic that we're all dealing with right now is how the fuck do we evoke change of the world? How is it when systems of institutional representation within politics and power failed to represent the will of the people, how did the people make change? And it feels like everything's been tried.

I mean, this is where, I mean, Fisher, who I would argue is at least an occultist or is at least has some mystical aspect, if not was at some point an occultist. Like, you know, reached at the point of capitalist realism, it's like most things that we, you know, can think of, we actually have, we have given a shot, including, including occultism. We have tried to do this. And yet here we are, the world's maybe not as bad,

as it has been, but it's not in a great spot. I think everyone listening to this would certainly understand that. And I think most people at the conference understood that. And yeah, I mean, I'm very skeptical of magic as a, certainly as an individual practice as a way to, you know, cause larger political change. But even, you know, can there even, and this revolves back to the concept of a culture, like, can there even be in a cult anymore? Because none of these, you know, magical things are very,

hidden anymore. They're all very accessible. They're all very visible. They're there as you know hidden as as a queer flagging is right as as an occult as an occultic ritual of you know hidden signs to communicate with other people in in the know something that is now you could just look up on the internet and I think occult occult practices and symbols have reached the same point. It's it's content. I mean I like the esoterica YouTube channel as much as uh as much as the next person. But, I mean, are these things even occult anymore? Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this current at the conference and the other current at the conference, which was the much more traditional magical practices or the folk magical practices or what we

would record. Extant magical practices. Yeah, extant magical practices that weren't suppressed by Christianity but carried over. So you have, you had a section on Kimbanda, you had a section on Palomyoombay, you have the Roma magical school that is being founded in Romania, and you have the modern goesha, the Iethes, right? Which we identified very clearly as a practice that continues to this very day. The context in which we understand that practice is not a cultum secret, like in the... No, it's just that, like, it's the stuff that you grew up with. It's every day.

And in that case, it's not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence. It's a kind of enchantment that by and large are kind of like, you know, European, Protestant, Catholic defectors, whatever has brought you to the occult in the first place, don't experience as a community or community engagement. But those are also things that can get deeply conservative. They are, but also the parts of those practices that do require initiation that are not something that everyone's grandmother is doing are also community-based and exists specifically. in and for community. And, you know, as occult projects that have influenced the world, the Haitian revolution.

The good revolution that we should all be talking about, yes. No, but these things do, but, I mean, the occult has bubbled to the surface in material ways very, very explicitly in some instances. And so I think there could be potential, but it does require being in community and being in service of,

community, even if it's not a practice that is being practiced by every single person around you. To be an on gun or a mamba in Haitian voodoo is to serve the community. It's not simply just a matter of magical woo or something like that, or the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like individual magical sense. No, you're serving your community. That's what it is that you're doing. It's first and foremost a service position on the Haitian Revolution. Look, I understand this. Like, the American, standing the American, American Revolution makes you, I guess, a classical liberal or whatever it is that you fetishize that into. If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you a, you know,

classical conservative, right? If you stand the Haitian Revolution, I guess that makes you a radical. The myth, the legend, the discussion, this understanding is that the Haitian Revolution was sparked by the possession of the Loa, specifically, is Idi Dantot, who, you know, sacrificed a pig. There's depictions of this. Haitian art all over the place. This leads to slave uprisings, rebellions, revolution, well-organized, fantastic. Yeah. Magical practice and action.

And that wraps up our panel discussion on the 2025 Culture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan, and Elaine for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin. And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing all of the talks I recorded and writing my written report on the Acculture Conference where I can go into a bit more depth into some of these topics and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism

and its ability to infest, influence, or undermine culture versus culture's capacity of eating away at the occult. That report should be coming out before the end of the year. See you on the other side. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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