Tag Archives: united states

In the Center of the Fire

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult 1966-1989 [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by James Wasserman.

This “warts and all” account of an American Thelemite’s personal quest also chronicles the axial development of the Thelemic movement in the second half of the 20th century, as well as the New York City occult scene of the 1970s. It reads very quickly. The prose is occasionally transparent as the factual condensation of diary data, but the honesty concerning events described is positively bracing. When I first heard announcement of this book’s impending publication, I knew I would need to have a copy. And now that I’ve read it, that knowledge is thrice-confirmed by the way that it ties together its fascinating matter through the integral experience of a true magician. Br. Wasserman doesn’t hesitate to relay his personal judgments of those characters — living and dead — with whom he has interacted, and in those cases where I have my own personal acquaintance with them, I concur with his verdicts. As rewarding as the text is, the many glossy pages of photos are especially gratifying. My Other Reader considered at least one of them “scandalous,” and they provide an important set of images to complement the narratives I have been gradually learning for the last two decades.

Strange Rites

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tara Isabella Burton.

This book’s more journalistic work follows in the steps of scholarship such as David Chidester’s Authentic Fakes in applying the tools of religious studies to American popular cultures. After an introductory anecdote regarding author Tara Elizabeth Burton’s own religious participation in “intense subcultures,” she starts by reviewing the demographics of the “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) who make up a large and growing portion of the American population. In particular, she observes the prevalence of the “faithful nones” who maintain “spiritual” identities while distancing themselves from “religious” institutions and traditions. She advances the label “Remixed” to designate the adherents of the sort of secularized quasi-sacred value systems and communities that propagate themselves through the consumerism of 21st-century mass society, with an emphasis on their customizable individualism.

Burton categorizes the faiths of the Remixed as “intuitionist religion,” and her thumbnail history of this phenomenon considerably overlaps the “Metaphysical religion” chronicled in Catherine Albanese’s Republic of Mind and Spirit. She traces one vector from 19th-century New Thought through 21st-century wellness culture; another of sexual revolution from Free Love to kink, polyamory and “consent culture” over the same historical span; and a yet another of neopagan occultism through the New Age and eventuating in a “Magical Resistance” in Trumpian America.

All of these past trends have had consequences in the three “postliberal paganisms” (246) that Burton sees as durably emergent from contemporary American culture. While some readers may be accustomed to noticing these alignments as political valences, this book observes (accurately, I think) that their political potency is a function of their differing and compelling religious visions. The first of these, already touched on in her prior discussion of activist witchcraft, is the social justice movement with its aim of moral renewal and measures to redress sexual and racial oppression. The second is the right-libertarian techno-utopian culture valorizing “rationality” and transhumanism. The third is the reactionary authoritarianism and chauvinism of a burgeoning neo-atavist movement. Burton notes perceptively that although adherents of these faiths may profess affection for or opposition to inherited theologies or metaphysics, none of them are incompatible with the starkest mechanistic materialism.

This book published in the first half of 2020 was then up-to-the-minute in its cultural assessments, but it predated the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, the protest wave following the police murder of George Floyd, and the US Capitol riot of January 2021. Each of these watershed events could be viewed as a manifestation of one of Burton’s three contending para-religions. The protests were clearly a development of the social justice movement. The lockdowns forced commerce and culture online, accelerating various techno-utopian projects (and enriching and empowering their proponents). The attempt to violently overturn Trump’s electoral defeat was an authoritarian disruption that demonstrated social cohesion among ideological actors previously characterized by “lone wolf” reactionaries.

(I couldn’t help recalling my reading of Mary Farrell Bednarowski’s New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America, where I correlated her three religious genera to the chapters of Liber Legis. In this case, I think it is fairly evident that Burton’s understanding of the social justice movement corresponds to the first chapter, her techno-utopians match the second, and her apocalyptic atavists fit the third.)

Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher [Amazon, Abebooks, Publisher, Local Library] by Eugene Sheppard, part of The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry.

I have only ever read one text by Leo Strauss (Persecution and the Art of Writing) and this is the first secondary work focused on him that I have read. Eugene Sheppard’s Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile: The Making of a Political Philosopher distinctly shows traces of its origin as a doctoral dissertation in Jewish intellectual history. The meat of the book is, for all that, very interesting. Sheppard examines Strauss’s biography and intellectual development only prior to his attainment of celebrity at the University of Chicago. He traces the philosopher’s origins among conservative rural Jews in Germany, his iconoclastic relationship to Weimar politics, the relationships that he formed with conservative scholars in Germany, and his difficult orientation to the academic scene in the US. The anecdotes and quotes from Strauss’s long friendship with Gershom Scholem were particularly notable, from my perspective.

Persecution and the Art of Writing is the climax and turning point of this narrative, where Strauss anchors his work in relationship to “the ramifications of multilevel writing as the philosophical response of one resigned to live in an imperfect society yet not fully willing to surrender a noble vision of the perfect regime” (80). Not only does Strauss write about the use of this technique in the Middle Ages and antiquity, along with its extinction in early modernity, he also writes using the technique, and dissimulating his atheist, anti-theological convictions while supporting the worldly authority of religious doctrines.

Like Sheppard, I find myself in disagreement with what I understand of Strauss’s mature politics. But I appreciate the extent to which Strauss seized on the dilemmas of liberal modernity, and I observe an essential congruity between the Jewish galut (condition of exile) and the Gnostic sense of alienation, in that both fuel the dynamics of esoteric expression. This book is fascinating and has only further encouraged me to read more Strauss.

Mutants and Mystics

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Jeffrey J Kripal.

This latest book from religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal treats the mutual generation of science fiction and paranormal mysticism, primarily under the figure of the costumed superhero of comic books. He explores the roots of late 20th-century popular culture in elite culture extending back into the 19th century, and caps it off with the case studies of comics artist Barry Windsor-Smith, science fiction author Phillip K. Dick, and “contactee” metaphysical speculator Whitley Streiber as instances of “supermodern gnosis” (255).

The body of the book is organized around a sequence of seven “mythemes” that constitute a “super-story” (Divinization/Demonization, Orientation, Alienation, Radiation, Realization, and Authorization) common to the culture of the paranormal that Kripal is presenting here. He manages to address these in a roughly chronological sequence reflecting their rising to prominence in literature and culture. Left unstated is the possibility that they represent an initiatic sequence which might transpire on the individual level in the same complex, feedback-ridden way that he shows it on the larger social scale.

Mutants and Mystics is physically gorgeous. It nicely bound on stunningly heavy stock, with a tough, non-gloss dust jacket. There are numerous full-page color illustrations throughout, mostly reproduced from the author’s private collection of comics and science fiction. The page designs include multicolor text and very appropriate fonts that are nevertheless unusual in academic publishing.

Throughout the book there is a sense of humor, and Kripal makes great efforts to suspend judgment about the “reality” of the paranormal narratives with which he deals, although he admits frankly the points at which those efforts weaken. He is a skeptical scholar, but he is also a sympathetic mystic who has had his own confessed paranormal experiences, and who can be swayed by apparent signs and portents. He admits to confusion about the nature of this or that manifestation, but insists on the validity of a shared phenomenological core. Sounding like a character in the pages of a comic himself, he insists “The damned thing is radioactive” (8)!

The book is fun, thought-provoking, and at 350 pages, over all too soon.

Horror Films of the 1990s

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Horror Films of the 1990s [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by John Kenneth Muir

I read this beefy volume after Clark and Senn’s similarly ambitious Sixties Shockers. While the 1960s were a transitional decade for horror movies, the 1990s were allegedly an ebb tide, in which horror was little-produced and hardly marketed as such. Muir does indeed cast a wide net, including such films as Jurassic Park (1993). “Interloper” and “police procedural” themes are among the elements that characterize the typical horror movies of the decade.

The central reviews section of the book is organized by year, and each year’s chapter begins with a timeline inventorying events of major cultural significance for that year. The critical emphasis is on the relationship of cinematic themes to then-current events. So much is this the case, that the reviews tend to omit comparisons to earlier films, except for the most overt sequels and remakes. For example, the review of Body Parts (1991) does not mention the seminal Hands of Orlac (1924, 1960) Nor does discussion of The Masque of the Red Death (DTV 1991) bring up Roger Corman’s magisterial 1964 version of the Poe tale. The stand-out exception is “Appendix D: Movie References in Scream,” which catalogs dozens of film allusions that occur in that 1996 post-modern meta-movie.

The reviews are fully equipped with star ratings and opinionated verdicts, which seemed awfully “accurate” to me, when I was in a position to compare my own views. I was especially pleased with the glowing review of The Ninth Gate (1999) — often the object of critical derision — Muir even placed it at number five in his “Ten Best” list for the decade.

That list is one of a number of clever and useful apparatus elements placed as appendices. “1990s Horror Conventions” provides an index of movies by common tropes, such as “Car Won’t Start,” “H.P. Lovecraft,” and “Vampires.” (The absence of my favorite “Girl on Altar” is sadly due to its general neglect in the movies themselves.) “The 1990s Horror Hall of Fame” is an inventory of notable performers. Having noted that theater horror features were at a disadvantage in the 1990s because of small-screen competition from The X-Files, Muir backs up his claim by tabulating about thirty matches of central plot elements between 1990s horror films and individual X-Files episodes as “Appendix E.”

On the whole, this book accomplishes its goals capably and with a fair amount of style.

Opposing the System

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Opposing the System [Amazon, Local Library] by Charles A Reich.

Yale law professor Charles A. Reich’s best-known book is The Greening of America (1970), in which he promoted what he saw as the goals of the youth counterculture of that time. Opposing the System was written in the mid-1990s, shortly after the so-called “Republican Revolution” in US electoral politics and reflects on Reich’s concerns at that later period.

The book is a manifesto for social renewal in the US. One of its most valuable observations is that large commercial corporate entities are in fact governments, simply authoritarian ones unaccountable to the public–or even to their own shareholders in most cases. The quasi-libertarian rhetoric so common in establishment US politics and punditry reflects the functioning of a System in which private and public governmental functions are interlocked (military-industrial complex, “mainstream” media, carceral industry, etc.) to escape responsibilities and externalize/deny costs.

Every troubling symptom in Reich’s diagnosis has gotten significantly worse in the last quarter century. He doesn’t even mention climate change. The System he outlines has gotten more entrenched.

“We cannot expect to control the System unless we can place ourselves at an intellectual level above the System, where we can see the infinite other possibilities of life as well” (199). Reich makes this observation in the context of the need to restore citizenship. But he leaves unspecified how people are supposed to rise above the System. Formal education has been degraded into training, especially at the primary and secondary levels. In recent years especially, public education is under a full-scale assault, both figurative in the sense of ideologies imposed by the System on schools and teachers (including budgetary austerity), and literal in the sense of massacres and the terrorizing “drills” they inspire.

Reich’s occasional appeal to “American ideals” supposedly held by the Constitutional founders of the US rings as a little naïve, but it is understandable in the context of public persuasion. More importantly, he points out the real value and context of the aborted New Deal, and the recognition in the mid-twentieth century of the threat that has come to manifest in the System.

The book is no silver bullet, but it is something of a tonic for those of us who are caught in the cognitive dissonance that results from the massively propagandized world of what Reich calls the “Existing Map” of reality.

Lunar and Sex Worship

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Lunar and Sex Worship [Amazon, Abebooks, Weiser Antiquarian, Publisher, Local Library] by Ida Craddock, edited and introduction by Vere Chappell.

Lunar and Sex Worship is an initial, long-posthumous publication of two chapters of a projected larger work on comparative religion by the American sex-reformer and mystic Ida Craddock. As it is, these two chapters make a hefty book. Barely 50% of the verbiage is Craddock’s own, since she quotes at length from her preferred sources, who include Thomas Inman, J.G.R. Forlong, and most prominently Gerald Massey (who is probably the least credible of the lot, alas). For those familiar with the earlier works on which Craddock depends, there may not be much new here, other than her particular feminist perspective on the material. The book does stand as a pretty accurate and accessible digest of 19th-century solar-phallic theory of religion, however.

Surprisingly, Craddock has interesting contributions to make on the topic of “aeonics,” or the historical succession of global magical formulae. She uses a novel strategy in an attempt to pinpoint what Thelemites will understand as the transition between the Aeons of Isis and Osiris (19-21). She also discusses the messianic moment corresponding to the advent of the Aeon of Horus (264).

Editor Vere Chappell has been a relentless 21st-century researcher and champion of Craddock, and his introduction contextualizes Lunar and Sex Worship well enough for contemporary readers. I am grateful that he also furnished the book with an index: considering the wide range of topics that it covers, with no subheadings within its two enormously long chapters, the index is a crucial feature–even if it fails to have an entry for “ass” (Craddock’s passage on lunar onolatry may be found on 94-95)!

The best part of the book is the closing pages, where she decries the sexual repression of modern Christianity, and calls for a return of phallic religious sensibility. She holds out hope that the “storehouse of symbolism” in Catholic Christianity may yet contribute to a restored worship of the generative power, enhanced by scientific knowledge and an ethic of universal brotherhood (252).

Slow Learner

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Slow Learner: Early Stories [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Thomas Pynchon

This aptly-titled collection of short fiction is a superfluity that I keep on my shelf only for the satisfaction of approaching completeness in my Pynchon collection. While none of these stories are really terrible, it is clear that by the time he had written Vineland, Pynchon had already cannibalized his early shorts for everything of value, recycling the elements to much greater effect in his novels. I’d recommend it to scholars and sleuths contemplating the genealogy of Pynchon’s writing I guess, but for most readers I’d say the contents are better encountered in their later, consummated forms.

The Secret Life of a Satanist

The Secret Life of a Satanist: The Authorized Biography of Anton LaVey [Amazon, Abebooks, Bookshop, Local Library] by Blanche Barton, reviewed by Majere, Pr.ODF in the Bkwyrm’s Occult Book Reviews archive.

This is the “authorised” biography of the late Anton LaVey, as penned by his Mistress and High Priestess of the Church of Satan, Blanche Barton. It covers most of his life in considerable detail up until the founding of his Church in 1966, then moves on to examine his philosophies and observations of the world around him. Initially, after the publication of this book, quite a few voices arose to challenge the authencity of it’s contents – among them “Rolling Stone” magazine. Especially held in doubt is LaVey’s alleged “fling” with pre-fame days Marilyn Monroe (no biographies of Monroe have ever mentioned such a relationship). So therefore (also considering the obvious bias of the biographer in purporting the contents are pure fact) it is suggested that the reader keep tongue jammed firmly in cheek. Having said that, it is of considerable interest to those who are keen to read more about LaVey’s observations and ideals; in this respect, he is – as usual – forthright in a no-bullshit manner. Basically, it has to be admitted that whether you like or loathe LaVey, he doesn’t pull punches as to what he is and what he stands for – whether you find such agreeable or not. Includes photos. Recommended primarily for fans only, or those who are simply curious.

As John C. Calhoun, the 7th Vice President of the United States once wrote, “The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.”

J M R Higgs, KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money [Amazon, Publisher]

The Hermetic Library Blog

Faint gibbering heard from somewhere near the restricted stacks