Unfoldings #2
Welcome to Unfoldings #2.
Reflections on Queerying Occultures
My new essay collection Queerying Occultures is now available directly from Original Falcon Press and (hopefully) beginning to percolate into shops. It’s also available in print and for Kindle on Amazon. It’ll be a while before it’s available in UK shops tho’.
This book has been a long time in turning up. It’s not the book I was planning to write – I have at least two others in progress, but it jumped itself to the head of the queue, as it were. It wouldn’t have happened without David Southwell, who first planted the idea for me to repurpose essays originally posted on my blog, enfolding, and also Nick Tharcher of Original Falcon Press, who, somewhat to my surprise, was delighted to take it on. My thanks also to Patricia MacCormack for her eloquent foreword and to Lou Hart, for her memoir of life at the UK’s Queer Pagan Camp. I wanted Maria Strutz’s wonderful “snails in love” painting for the cover even before I’d worked out what the contents would be. It took ages to come up with the cover typography, but I think it is one of my best efforts.
I’ve wanted to write something substantial about the British Queer/Occult scene ever since the late 1980s. I recall a conversation I had with a fairly well-known occult author – gay, but definitely closeted as far as the UK occult public was concerned. His opinion was that no publisher would touch such a proposal. Queers weren’t interested in the occult and the occult had no space for queers, was more or less how he put it. He went on to say that his audience was mostly young straight men and that if they found out he was queer he could kiss his lecture and workshop career goodbye. That was in the eighties, and much has changed since then. Occult homophobia was pretty much wall-to-wall back then. Explanations abounded. Blocked chakras, downward kundalini, reversed polarity, cosmic principles – take your choice. Thinking back, all this had two important effects on me. Firstly, I became angry, and that impelled me to take a stand. First “coming out” in pagan & occult spaces, doing articles and lectures, and generally kicking out against the ingrained prejudice that seemed to be everywhere I looked. One of the first of these “angry” essays – A Clause for Concern – written in 1991 is in my Hine’s Varieties collection. The second effect – perhaps more significant for my entanglement with occult perspectives on life, the universe and everything was that I started to question the facticity – the absolute certainty with which occult authors delivered their pronouncements on sexuality, desire, and gender. Take, for example, Gareth Knight’s assertion in his A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism (1962, 2001)
“homosexuality, like drugs, is a technique of black magic ... In spite of the modern state of apologetics for this form of lower emotional and physical relationship it is a perversion and evil”.
Was I really automatically a “black magician” and “evil” simply for taking drugs and fancying other men? It seemed to me that here was an example of an “occult truth” – delivered without any equivocation or room for debate – which I simply could not accept as legitimate. I started to wonder just how many other occult statements of ‘truth’ or so-called cosmic laws were in actuality rooted in prejudice, or based on unthinking assumptions, folk psychology, faulty logic, or what we now call “alternative facts”.
Occult authors do have a tendency to view their own ideas and opinions as though they were cosmic laws, delivered steaming, still shedding ice, from some Platonic realm of pure truth. Until we learn otherwise, it is very easy to go along with this. After all, who are we, mere beginners along the path to question the words of a great and wise adept or spiritual master? It is a matter of confidence, I feel. If we don’t feel confident, as we move into a new territory of thought and action, it’s often difficult to admit that we have reservations and counter-opinions. In my early years, I read a great deal and probably understood – in the sense of actually mulling ideas over – very little of it. But at the same time, I absorbed a great deal of information without actually realizing it and just accepted it at face value. I neither questioned what I was reading, nor did I try and pick holes in a statement about the nature of reality, or whether what was being presented as unvarnished and platonic truth was actually an opinion, and where that opinion might have come from. This desire to probe, to discover where an “occult truth” hailed from – and, if necessary, to deflate it, is what impelled me, in part, to take an interest in the history of ideas.
At one point in the mid-90s, I was actually considering doing a book on sexual magic from a “chaos” perspective. Two essays from this project survive, both in collections by the late Dr. Christopher Hyatt. They are both awful so I am not going to point you in their direction. By that time I’d read a lot of books on sexual magic and was coming to my own conclusions. But what really sunk the project was that I realized that if I wanted to move beyond the all-too-familiar occult tropes and assumptions, this was simply too big a subject – too complex and too messy to reduce to the simplistic assertions that can be codified according to the Tree of Life or arranged around a chaos sphere.
Queerness, for me, indicates a quality of unruliness, a refusal to be boxed, ordered, or explained. It is willful disobedience. Is there a contrast, I wonder, between the notion of the directed and purposive “magical will” and queer willfulness? I’m still pondering that one as I leaf through Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects. It is a line of flight in progress. There may be more to come on that one.
Bits of the above have been incorporated into my latest blog post - On Reading Occult Books.
A recent interview: 10 Questions
I did a short “10 questions” email interview with Rebecca Elson of The Magical Buffet. Here it is.
New interview
I’ve just had a very enjoyable chat with Robert and Wade who do the Magick.TV podcast. Here I am discussing Queering Occulture, along with all the usual subjects - Chaos, Tantra, Wonder, and evoking (according to the auto-subtitling “thirty-six legions of Stevens”.
Acts of magical resistance
On Monday 20th February, Patricia MacCormack and I did a presentation at Helgi’s Bar in London, entitled Queer(y)ing Chaos Magic. I really enjoy doing presentations with Patricia, as I always come away having learned something new or been inspired to think about something in a different way.
If you’re not familiar with Patricia’s work, check out this podcast interview:
Occulture-Philosophy
Part of the presentation was concerned with taking a different approach to Chaos Magic and what this might look like - suggestions rather than prescriptions. My main contribution tho’ was a “review” of various approaches to Magical Activism, sprinkled with my own anecdotes about helping organize Mass Rituals, Pagans against the Poll Tax, and other dubious activities. I’ve written about some of these actions in the past, but somewhat hesitantly (for example, Recollections of an occasional pagan activist) but I now feel this is a good moment to gather some of these reflections together and disseminate them - most likely as a free, or donation-offered pdf. Watch this space.
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.