ISSUE THREE

MODERN CCULTIST

The NEW Quarterly Esoteric Journal

SUMMER SOLSTICE 2026

THE

S O A CH

MAGIC ISSUE

SPARKS OF INSPIRATION Maevius Lynn on the Holy Year of Thelema and the Summer Solstice

MEMETICS FOR MAGICKIANS Gavin Fox on the modern usage of digital symbolism in Chaos Magick

PUTTING THE CHAOS IN CHAOS Thumper Forge on Condensed Chaos, Crafting with Chaos, and the Chaos Apple

PETER J. CARROLL, 1953-2026 Modern Occultist remembers one of the seminal figures of Chaos Magick CHAOS & PLEASURE The Life and Legacy of Austin Osman Spare

Robert Anton Wilson: A Life in Discordianism according to his biographers

turing a fe M I L O LON ETTE DUQU

Occult Reads: A new section dedicated to the latest literary esoteric offerings

EL IC H A M N JOH R GREE

MODERN CCULTIST PUBLISHERS C. M. Kushins

Diana Serhal

EDITOR IN CHIEF C.M. Kushins

MANAGING EDITOR Diana Serhal

DIRECTOR OF COMMUNICATIONS Abigail Cole MODERN OCCULTIST MEDIA OFFICES Email modernoccultistmag@gmail.com Web www.modernoccultist.com Modern Occultist Magazine is a digital scholarly lifestyle publication for the modern reader of esoteric history and practices available online at www.modernoccultist.com. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of quotations embodied in digital and print reviews.

2026. Modern Occultist Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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The

Chaos Chaos Magic Magic issue issue

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CONTENTS LON MILO DUQUETTE

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The legendary occult author and practictioner shares Hollywood stories, thoughts on Jack Parsons’ legacy, and his personal writing routine.

JOHN MICHAEL GREER

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Bestselling esoteric author and Pagan educator talks about the historical Merlin and the eduring legacy of Freemasonry in today’s Ceremonial Magic.

SPARKS OF INSPIRATION 09 Maevius Lynn on the Holy Year of Thelema and the Summer Solstice.

CHAOS & PLEASURE

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The life and occult art of Austin Osman Spare.

OCCULT READS

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A new era for Modern Occultist begins with the launch of our in-depth literary hub!

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CONTRIBUTORS Lon Milo DuQuette is a preeminent esoteric scholar and the author of sixteen critically acclaimed books on magick and the occult, including Enochian Vision Magick and The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford.

Visit him at www.LonDuQuette.com.

One of the most respected writers and teachers in the occult field today, John Michael Greer has written more than fifty books on esoteric traditions, nature spirituality, and the future of industrial society. An initiate in Druidic, Hermetic, and Masonic lineages, he served for twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). He lives in Rhode Island, USA with his wife Sara. He can be found online at www.EcoSophia.net.

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Maevius Lynn is a writer, artist, international lecturer, and ceremonial magician who currently resides in the Southern United States. Her work approaches Thelema as a living tradition from the perspective of both a solitary practitioner and an initiate of Ordo Templi Orientis and Temple of the Silver Star. Her work includes YouTube educational videos, online study groups, workshops, and lectures at Pagan and occult conferences, books, magazine articles, and art. Visit her at MaeviusLynn.com.

Thumper Forge is a Gardnerian High Priest, an initiate of the Minoan Brotherhood, an Episkopos of the Dorothy Clutterbuck Memorial Cabal of Laverna Discordia, and a notary public. He also blogs for Patheos Pagan. Learn more at ThumperForge.com.

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Gavin Fox is a freelance occult and paranormal author currently residing in Cardiff, South Wales. As to be expected of someone who grew up in London’s East End, Gavin has an eclectic and at times sarcastic view of culture in general, and this thread of gallows humour runs throughout his work. A dedicated observer of the spectacle, he has gone on to excel at creating engaging longform articles on a variety of weird and unusual topics. These include chaos magick, necromancy, ghost hunting, demonolatry, paganism, hauntology, and the unfair treatment of his fellow occultists both past and present. Visit him at theacceleratedchaote.com

Eric Wagner, author of Straight Outta Dublin (Hilaritas, 2025) and An Insider’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson (New Falcon, 2004). In 1982 he began reading Robert Anton Wilson’s books, and in 1986 the two began corresponding. In the years since Eric began reading Wilson, he has traveled from Ingolstadt, Bavaria, to Aswan, Egypt, from Country Kerry, Ireland, to Honolulu, Hawaii, attempting to understand the ideas behind Wilson’s works. He continues to pursue a campaign of remedial reading, reading Melville, Ibn ‘Arabi, Tolstoy, Proust, Stendhal, etc.

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Tom Jackson is an author and the editor of Every Day is

a GOOD Day: Robert Shea on Illuminatus! Writing and Anarchism from Hilaritas Press, as well as the moderator of the official Robert Anton Wilson blog, www.rawillumination.net.

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The revival of deep public interest in psychic matters is only a matter of time, and then those things which have been of absorbing interest to the few will become of vital interest to the many.

—Oliver Bland, The Adventures of a Modern Occultist (1920)

EDITOR’S DESK Welcome, Dear Reader, and Blessed Summer Solstice!

The candles are still burning light, and this time, you are invited to step in with us into the world of CHAOS MAGICK...

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This edition is broader and more diverse than ever. We have Wicca and witches, magicians and authors, artists, and seekers from two continents.

First, let us Thank our new affiliates, who generously assisted in bringing our readers new voices and visions you’ll find inside, and whose in-depth, comprehensive book reviews you can read in our brand new segment on our website, OCCULT READS, a hub for all of the latest occult, esoteric, and metaphysical book releases. You can get familiar of the publications of Llewellyn Worldwide, HarperOne, Inner Traditions, Aeon Spirit, Crossed Crow Books, Hilaritas Press, Red Wheel/Weiser, New Falcon Publications, The Original Falcon Press, SIRIUS Limited Esoterica, Rare Biblio, Starfire Publishing, Scarlet Imprint, and Anathema Publishing....

"The one thing I want newcomers to understand is also the one misconception I want them to leave behind: Nothing bad will happen to you when you start to practice magic," contributor Thumper Forge told us in an exclusive interview.

“Magick for me is cut and paste. Collage. Bricolage. Patchwork synthesis. Stripping the core correlations out of a hundred different spell books and stapling them back together as a battering ram to bust open the doors to the treasure vault of abundance so I can grab something shiny.,” so claims Chaos Magicikian Gavin Fox, whose innovative and bold essay, "Memetics for Magickians", will lead reader towards a new understanding of Chaos Magick in the modern world.

You will be able to immerse yourself, dear reader, in seven interviews from our wonderful contributors, including the legendary Lon Milo DuQuette and John Michael Greer, Maevius Lynn, Eric Wagner, and Tom Jackson. Lastly, from your very own Modern Occultist editors, you'll get exclusive pieces on Austin Osman Spare and a memorial on the great late Peter J. Carroll.

We hope you will enjoy this edition of Modern Occultist, and be sure to also take a look at our previous issues of Techgnosis and Manifestation! Thank you, and please, also join us in the Fall, for our Autumn Equinox issue on ANGELS AND DEMONS! The candles have been lit...

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with

John Michael Greer

JMG Three books did it. One was Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin, a first-rate study of the historical realities behind the Merlin legend; the other two were R.J. Stewart’s The Prophetic Vision of Merlin and The Mystic Life of Merlin, which unpack two of the core medieval Merlin texts to show the profound occult philosophy woven into them. By the time I finished reading those it was clear to me that the Disneyfied Merlin I’d grown up with was not merely fake but a crass debasement of a deep spiritual reality.

MO

On a personal note, do you have a favorite on-screen Merlin? Full disclosure, Nicol Williamson IS Merlin to me…

Merlin's Wheel: Self-Initiation in the Druid Tradition & The Secret of the Temple: Earth Energies, Sacred Geometry, and the Lost Keys of Freemasonry Aeon Books, 2025 & 2026

MODERN OCCULTIST

I’ve long admired how one of your earlier books, The Occult Philosophy Workbook, can be used as a perfect primer for nearly any magical or esoteric systems that a reader would continue to study postcoursework. Your most recent works, however, have largely combined your own passions in ethical nature-based philosophies with modern Paganism—which I love!

JMG There I’m going to have to disappoint you. I’ve never seen a visualmedia version of Merlin I liked. That’s one of the two reasons I put Merlin as a character in my novel The Weird of Hali: Arkham, the last volume of my epic fantasy with tentacles—I wanted to portray Merlin something like the way I imagine him. (The other reason was that H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories gave me much of my raw material, included Merlin as a minor figure in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and that was far too tempting a morsel to leave out of my tale!)

“On the one hand, the ceremonial magic scene is still trying to grapple with the sheer volume and complexity of a tradition far older and vaster

JOHN MICHAEL GREER Thank you. I’ve gone back and forth between these two general themes through most of my writing career. I first broke into print with a sequence of Golden Dawn-themed books back in the 1990s, starting with Paths of Wisdom, then started writing about Druidry in the next decade, and—well, my interests include both those themes as well as others, so my book projects wind back and forth across a fairly broad landscape of ideas. We’ll talk a little later about how artificial the current barriers between those themes really are.

MO

In Merlin's Wheel you make a compelling case that the figure of Merlin— pop culture wizard aside—preserves the memory of a genuinely archaic Celtic deity, one whose myths encode a system of spiritual transformation that predates Stonehenge. How did you first begin to suspect that the Merlin legends were pointing back to something that ancient, and what was the moment in your research when that suspicion became a conviction?

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than most people realized until recently. On the other, most modern Pagans, at least in the U.S., are so caught up in political activism these days that it’s surprising they have time to do anything else.”

MO

The fissure you describe in Merlin's Wheel between ceremonial magicians and the broader Pagan community is something many of our readers will recognize acutely—they've lived on one side of it or the other (and many, like myself, due to your wonderful previous books on the Grail and its place within modern Pagan practices!). Your work in

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books like The Celtic Golden Dawn and now Merlin's Wheel seems designed to heal that divide by demonstrating that the two traditions were never actually separate. Do you think that reunification is happening in the broader community, or are the two camps still talking past each other?

JMG I’d love to say that I’ve seen evidence that ceremonial magicians are getting more interested in nature-centered spirituality, or that a significant number of today’s Pagans are getting past the bunny slope level of esoteric practice, but I haven’t seen it. On the one hand, the ceremonial magic scene is still trying to grapple with the sheer volume and complexity of a tradition far older and vaster than most people realized until recently. On the other, most modern Pagans, at least in the U.S., are so caught up in political activism these days that it’s surprising they have time to do anything else. If the barriers are going to fall, it’s going to be a slower process than I once hoped.

What makes this all the more annoying is that the barriers in question were manufactured in the late 20th century and did not exist before then. Was Dion Fortune a ceremonial magician or a Pagan? Both, of course. William Butler Yeats? Ditto.Ross Nichols, the most influential figure in twentieth century Druidry? Ditto. Oh, and let’s also include esoteric Christianity in that mix. Gerald Gardner, the founder of modern Wicca, was also an ordained priest in an esoteric Christian church, and was active in it at the same time as he was leading his coven. Dion Fortune saw no contradiction in attending Anglican services, practicing Golden Dawn magic, and invoking Isis and Pan, all in the course of a single week. All these things and more are part of a wider Western esoteric tradition that is far stronger in its unity than it is when, as now, it’s chopped apart into bloddy gobbets by fossilized bigotries among competing factions.

profusion of sources, from Jewish texts about the Temple of Solomon to the practices of Japanese Shinto to the legends of the Holy Grail and more. Always it was the same theme: do certain things that have to do with architecture and ritual, and the fields flourish.

The thing that convinced me that there was really something to it, though, was a detail mentioned in Seed of Knowledge, Stone of Plenty, a fascinating book by John Burke and Kaj Halberg. They’d discovered that exposing seeds to a strong magnetic field made them sprout and grow more vigorously, and happened to find out that certain sacred structures, such as Mayan pyramids, concentrate the earth’s magnetism at their peaks. Then they visited the Yucatan peninsula and found out that the local native peoples, who are descended from the ancient Mayans and speak Mayan languages, still take their seed corn to the tops of the old pyramids and leave it there for a while before planting it.

That wasn’t the technology I was exploring, but it proved that archaic folk technologies related to agriculture did exist, and could be connected to religions practice.

MO

Both books circle around the same deep question from different angles: what gets lost when a living mystery tradition dies, and what—if anything—can be recovered or reconstructed? In Merlin's Wheel you argue that self-initiation through ceremonial practice can genuinely reconnect a practitioner with the inner realities behind a lost tradition, and in The Secret of the Temple you suggest that the "Waste Land" of the Grail legends may be something more than metaphor—that something real went out of the land when the temple technology was suppressed. Are these two ideas connected for you? And, like so much proactive occult education, is the work of recovery both inner and outer simultaneously?

The Secret of the Temple advances one of the most quietly audacious arguments in contemporary occult scholarship: that ancient temples— from Solomon's to the great Celtic shrines—functioned as a literal folk technology for agricultural fertility, and that this technology was deliberately encoded in what became the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff and the Grail romances. For readers encountering this thesis for the first time—what's the single most persuasive piece of evidence you found, the thread that, once pulled, made the whole pattern visible?

JMG The ideas are connected only to the extent that both have left traces in Arthurian legend—but then a whale of a lot of other things have left traces in the vast storehouse of archaic myth, sacred science, and dimly remembered magic we call “Arthurian legend.”The material I’ve tried to tease out of the Merlin legend in Merlin’s Wheel is primarily inner, relating to the spiritual development of the individual. The material central to The Secret of the Temple is primarily outer—it’s a technology, and at least in theory, anyone who can reconstruct the technology can use it and benefit from it, irrespective of their spiritual commitments.

The temple technology was used by religious traditions ranging from medieval Western Christianity to Japanese Shinto, so I don’t imagine there are many paths it can’t work with!

“Dogmatism is a massive hindrance if

MO

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you’re engaged in magical practice; the competent mage must always be prepared to set aside preexisting opinions and simply pay attention to what works, what gets results, in terms of his or her own personal experience.”

JMG It’s not a matter of a single piece of evidence; if there was some such piece, the whole pattern would have become visible long before I started work on it. I began to guess that there was a practical technology underlying the ancient temples when I started finding references to agricultural fertility as a central theme in a giddy

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You've been extraordinarily prolific across an enormous range—Druidry, Hermeticism, geomancy, peak oil, political philosophy, fiction—and yet there's a recognizable “Greer sensibility” (and readability!) running through all of it: a deep respect for what we might call the limits of the case, a refusal to overclaim, a willingness to say this is speculative but here's why it's worth following. Where does that epistemic discipline come from, and do you ever find it in tension with the demands of magical practice, which sometimes seems to require a degree of commitment that goes beyond what the evidence strictly supports?

JMG It astonishes me that basic epistemic humility is so rare these days. Can we please be real? The human brain is a lump of greasy gelatin six inches long. It can do some remarkable things, but to claim that it can make any kind of sense of a universe trillions of light years across is obviously absurd. All we have to go on is our own experience, and the experiences of others handed down to us in the form of teachings; summed up, that amounts to nothing more than the hoots and grunts of a very few members of one species of social primate inhabiting the wet film on the third rock from a minor star in an incomprehensibly vast

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universe. Mystics have been pointing this out for thousands of years.

Philosophers demonstrated it with unanswerable logic centuries ago: Immanuel Kant, for example, showed conclusively that we can know precisely nothing for certain about the world as it really is, because everything we get is filtered through the complex kluge job of our senses, nervous systems, and psychology. None of this should be news.

It struck me as basic common sense even before I started getting a grasp on the impressive philosophical evidence that backs it up.

Yet people keep stumbling along, insisting that whatever cerebral flatulence they inhaled from their parents, their schools, their churches, or the corporate media is The Truth, full stop, end of sentence. That it certainly is not. What it is, all it is, is a rough approximation, as far from what it represents as a child’s stick figure of a horse is from the surging, sweating reality of a horse at full gallop. Now of course the stick-figure teachings we get can be useful, but it baffles me that so many people go out of their way to mistake the map for the territory!

As for conflict between epistemic limits and magical practice, oh, quite the contrary. Dogmatism is a massive hindrance if you’re engaged in magical practice; the competent mage must always be prepared to set aside preexisting opinions and simply pay attention to what works, what gets results, in terms of his or her own personal experience. You don’t have to “believe in” the Tree of Life, let’s say, in order to use it, and getting hung up on one particular version of the Tree as The One True Version can get in the way of being able to work creatively with the many versions out there. To borrow a convenient bit of Greek, this is the difference between doxa, “opinion,” and gnosis, “personal acquaintance.” You have tobe ready to set aside doxa to be open to gnosis. You have to realize how little you know if you want to learn.

MO

In your personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students and initiates—how would you describe “Occult Philosophy”?

JMG A set of symbolic descriptions that help practitioners of occult disciplines make sense of their experiences. The teachings of occult philosophy should never be taken as truths; to borrow a line from Dion Fortune, they are meant to train the mind, not to inform it.

MO

What was your personal start on your own journey on this path (or chosen profession)?

JMG From early childhood I had the sense that there was something wonderful hidden off beyond the plastic façade of 20th century suburbia, where I grew up. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a feeling that it was something rejected, something weird. That led me into any number of odd byways, helped by the explosion of books on alternative culture that made the 1960s and 1970s so colorful. Then one bleak and wintry day in 1976, while I was being dragged around a department store in downtown Seattle by my mother, I happened to end up in the book department. (Department stores had those back then.) There on one of the racks of paperbacks was Techniques of High Magic by Francis King and Stephen Skinner, a basic intro to Golden Dawn magic, with a fine lurid cover I recall vividly to this day.

If the Holy Grail had been wafted down to me by angels, right there in that department store, my world wouldn’t have been rocked any more dramatically. I knew, with gut-punch intensity, that magic was the thing I’d been looking for all along, that magic was going to be the keynote of my life, and that the book in my shaking hands was the first stepping stone that would lead me out of my miserable childhood toward better things. Did I buy it? You bet. I took it home, read it with feverish intensity, and then I did what fifteen-year-olds generally do: I set it aside, dabbled in it, read lots of books and did very little practice.

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Even so, the die was cast; when I got to work following a magical path, I started with the same Golden Dawn tradition I’d learned about from the book by King and Skinner, and spent the next fifteen years or so working hard on that approach to magic. From there, the rest followed.

MO

To this magazine, the concept of “modern occultism” can (and should) be equally viewed from both the academic and practical sides. What would you recommend to a person only now coming along to these subjects, and is uncertain if an objective academic career, or a true “practical path” may be right for them?

JMG That’s a very difficult question to answer right now because the academic scene in the US is in terminal crisis. Most of the people I know in academia are either scrambling to get out or hoping that they can retire before things fall apart completely. The sheer financial cost of an academic degree these days is so high, and the opportunities to do anything with most degrees are becoming so scarce, that I honestly can’t recommend an academic career to anybody these days. If you want to become an independent scholar, that’s another matter, but in that case you’ll have to write, blog, or find some other venue outside the academy to attract an audience for your work.

I also note that much of the best work being done these days on esoteric traditions is from people who bridge the gap between academic and practitioner paths. Right now, for example, I’m reading a first-rate book, The Serpent’s Tale: Kundalini, Yoga, and the History of an Experience, by Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen. Both authors are capable scholars with a fine command of the academic literature on the history of kundalini; both are also practitioners with personal experience of kundalini yoga. This combined approach gives their work a clarity, a cogency, and a relevance that neither a purely academic nor a purely practiced-based approach can provide.

Thus I’d like to recommend that anybody who is interested in occultism should study it from both academic and practice-based perspectives.

They should study the literature and learn the history, but they should also explore the practice in person. The division between these two is artificial and harmful, and the academic politics that made it necessary for scholars to avoid practice—well, that’s collapsing along with the current form of the academy itself.

MO

What is one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped shape your journey and personal philosophies that you would recommend to a new student or occult practitioner (or historian / academic)?

JMG Dion Fortune, who’s been mentioned several times already in this interview, has been the single most important influence on my own conception of occultism, and I recommend her work to anyone interested in modern occult theory and practice. If I had to specify a book, it wouldn’t be one of the famous ones—the novels, say, or The Mystical Qabalah, important as those are. What I found most useful were the collections of her essays: Applied Magic, The Training and Work of the Initiate, and so on. Reading one or more of those volumes an essay at a time, and reflecting on what they say and avoid saying, is an education worth having.

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Lynn Shares How to Craft SPARKS of Maevius Your Own Thelemic INSPIRATION Summer Solstice Altar New to celebrating the summer solstice? Here are some simple ideas to help you begin. These are meant to be sparks that light flames of your o w n i m a g i n a t i o n a n d c r e a t i v i t y. F e e l f r e e t o adapt and expand these ideas to fit to your own practice.

During the Summer Solstice, meditate on the light of the sun as a metaphor for the light and guidance of your Holy Guardian Angel. Visualize its rays shining all around and inside of you, illuminating even your darkest parts.

Adopt “Abrahadabra” as a personal mantra throughout the d a y. U s e t h i s w o r d o f p o w e r t o c o n n e c t y o u r s e l f t o t h e c o n c e pt o f a n d t h e G r e a t Wo r k i n t h e c u r r e nt Ae o n o f Horus.

What are some areas of your life that could benefit from more light? What might need more attention, examination, and energy? Contemplate this through meditation and journaling.

The bright rays of the sun touch the world with such w a r m t h a n d j o y o n t h i s d a y. A s t h e s u n r e a c h e s i t s p e a k , reflect on what brings you joy in your life. How can you cultivate more joy in your life?

F r o m T h e H o l y Ye a r o f T h e l e m a b y M a e v i u s Ly n n . © 2 0 2 6 b y M a ev i u s Ly n n . U s e d by p e r m i s s i o n f r o m L l ewe l l y n Wo r l d w i d e, Lt d . , w w w. L l e w e l l y n . c o m . P h o t o c o u r t e s y o f M a e v i u s Ly n n .

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This working’s shortness and simplicity makes it a good choice if you’re short on time or e n e r g y t o d e v o t e t o m o r e e l a b o r a t e r i t u a l . Yo u may change and adapt this working to fit your own space and practice.

Yo u W i l l N e e d Two c a n d l e s o f a ny s i z e ( t wo w h i t e o r t wo maroon) The Chariot Card from the Thoth deck In the day or two leading up to the solstice, place two candles and the Chariot card from the Thoth deck on the altar. I have found that preparing the altar a few days before the actual solstice is an effective way to capture and project the energy created through anticipation. The color of the two candles placed on the altar can correspond to what you would like to focus more on: white symbolizes the sun’s strength and radiance, and maroon represents the astrological correspondence of Cancer in the Queen color scale. If you’d like, adorn the altar with other appro¬priate items as well such as decorations depicting the sun or lotus flowers.

On the Summer Solstice, light the candles and express your intention of aligning yourself with the radiance a n d l i g h t o f t h e S u n o r y o u r H o l y G u a r d i a n A n g e l . Yo u may express this intention silently or out loud. A suggestion on what you can say: “May my path be illuminated by the light of truth, and the Sun’s rays r e m i n d m e o f t h e j o y o f i n c a r n a t i o n .”

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with

Maevius Lynn

coming up with new ideas or new projects. These holy days may just simply be one of things he regrettably never got to.

M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T Yo u r b o o k o p e n s w i t h a f a s c i n a t i n g observation: that Aleister Crowley, the most prolific ritual writer in the Western esoteric tradition, left virtually no specific rituals for the holy days he h i m s e l f e s t a b l i s h e d . Yo u d e s c r i b e t h i s silence as “conspicuous”—even citing Crowley's own famous quip about things being “conspicuous by their absence.”

What do you make of that silence? Was it oversight, invitation, or something more deliberate on his part…?

M A E V I U S LY N N I think it is interesting that despite the central, sacred text of Thelema, The Book of the Law, calling for the celebration of the holy days, Aleister Crowley did not write rituals for them. I suppose we will never truly know why, but I suspect that it’s just simply a fact that he didn’t have enough time.

Reading through some of his biographies like Perdurabo you really get a sense that he was always busy

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MO All too often, Thelema is reduced in “mainstream” conversation to a single phrase—“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”—in erroneous ways that flatten its actual philosophical depth (not to mention missing the e n t i re p o i n t ! ) . Yo u r b o o k t a ke s considerable care to expl ain that True Will is not personal desire or egosatisfaction, but something considerably more demanding. For readers encountering Thelema seriously for the first time, how would you describe the distinction between doing what one wills and doing what one wants?

ML Similar to the holy days, the phrase “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” comes from The Book of the Law. It is one of the most universally misunder-

“I always think people, especially in this fast-paced tech driven attention economy, could use more mindfulness and awareness of self.

I think that is one of the beautiful things ritual magick delivers.

Practicing magick forces you to slow down and mindfully engage with yourself and your surroundings. I really do believe that a little bit of magick is better than no magick...”

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-stood quotes from our holy book. The phrase is a call to discover your innermost spark of divinity known as your True Will, and once you have discovered it, to align your choices and actions to it. It’s a call to live authentically and in alignment with this sacred, personal truth. This is not about what you want to do. In fact, this is a rather restrictive proposition. It is a call for you to do your True Will and nothing else regardless of personal feelings or whims of fancy.

Mand contributions of women both historical and modern.

I suppose I don’t view this as a situation needing the work of restoration. For me it’s like walking into your garden and finding a surprising beautiful flower no one else has noticed. I am just simply the gardener who noticed it, started tending to it, and called attention to it as a natural part of the landscape. It’s truly a joy to tend the garden that I also grow in.

MO Recently, Modern Occultist made a point of profiling Rose Edith Kelly as a major figure on our blog, and we were overjoyed to see the seriousness with which you presented her own story and c r u c i a l c o n t r i b u t i o n s to Th e l e m a . Yo u r chapter on the “First Night of the Prophet and His Bride” takes her seriously as a historical figure in her own right—something which we loved.

What do you feel the tradition owes Rose, and how does restoring her to her proper place in the history change our understanding of Thelema's origins?

ML I am delighted to hear that you enjoyed my exploration of Rose. She is the Bride referred to in the “First Night of the Prophet and His Bride,” so it felt fitting to spend equal time on her and the Prophet, Aleister Crowley. Women have always been there in the fabric of this tradition and we are blessed to have such a colorful character like Rose from its very inception. Even though she was not an occultist, she was still a woman with an interesting story and contributions worthy of remembering.

In my book I took care to paint a big, detailed picture of the history and magick of Thelema as it pertained to these holy days. This naturally includes figures like Rose who are often left out.

My idea was to put it all out there to broaden the reader’s perspective. I constantly had advanced practitioners in mind. I purposely included things you simply don’t find anywhere else.

Although my book is also beginnerfriendly, there are some deep cuts and many new things. One of these unique things was of course the perspective

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MO It is the stance of Modern Occultist that we are, indeed, in the depths of a new phase of cosmological evolution— be it Crowley’s Aeons, or the “ages” presented in historical astrology. Since the sheer concept of aeonic succession —the movement from the Aeon of Isis through the Aeon of Osiris and into the current Aeon of Horus—remains one of Thelema's most ambitious and (often) controversial claims, as someone who

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lives inside this framework as a practitioner, not just a scholar, what does it feel like to inhabit the beginning of an aeon? And what does the tradition mean when it calls this the “Aeon of the Child”?

ML I suppose a good place to start is what is “aeonic succession.” This is one of these ideas in Thelema that is very important, but less often talked about. I talk about it at length in my book because it is essential to understanding the holy day called the Equinox of the Gods as well as the Thelemic Calendar.

Aeonic succession is essentially an astrological event that occurs at specific points in human history. The length of an aeon is approximately 2000 years. In Thelema this is interpreted as periods of human history having different celestial rulers as well as a different magical formula. There are not exact dates for this and many often interpret this as a more poetic understanding of human history.

In terms of what it feels like to move from the old aeon, known as the Aeon of Osiris, into the new aeon, known as the Aeon of the Child or the Aeon of Horus, it feels like what we are experiencing now. It’s a time of change. A joyful embrace of the new while also the backlash of the old as it fades from existence. The “Aeon of the Child” is simply the current aeon we are living in. The child is the voice of the third chapter of The Book of the Law who has ascended to the throne of heaven. What this means to you, as I explicitly spell out in my book, is something for you to personally explore. Some interpret this through a monotheistic or polytheist lens while others approach it as a more atheistic outpouring of poetry reflecting human truths. The holy books of this tradition and the ideas in them are not another dogma to conform to.

They are instead an invitation to explore, reflect, and mindfully understand yourself and the world around you.

MO Yo u r b o o k i s ex p l i c i t l y p o s i t i o n e d a s t h e first word on the Thelemic ritual calendar, not the last—and you describe

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as a call to action for the ritualists of today and tomorrow. ( In the eyes of this magazine, that is one of your book’s greatest triumphs: the practical engagement of believers to take part in the evolution of an organic history.)

Crowley himself expressed hope for a “genius” to work out the dynamics of the formula of Horus in ways he felt unable to accomplish fully. Jack Parsons kinda failed; as someone who has heeded that call and stepped into that creative space, what do you believe the ritual life of Thelema in the twenty-first century most urgently needs? And, or equal importance, what do you hope practitioners take from The H o l y Ye a r o f T h e l e m a a s t h ey b u i l d t h a t life?

ML It’s wonderful to hear that. My book delivers both scholarly facts and the practical tools and inspiration to actually do magick. I always think people, especially in this fast-paced tech driven attention economy, could use more mindfulness and awareness of self. I think that is one of the beautiful things ritual magick delivers. Practicing magick forces you to slow down and mindfully engage with yourself and your surroundings. I really do believe that a little bit of magick is better than no magick. My hope is that readers walk away feeling empowered to actually do some magick. I laid out a grand diversity of ideas on how to approach the holy days found throughout the year from simple to elaborate. My hope is that everyone has the time to celebrate themselves, their journey, and do a little bit of magick along the way.

MO Although you’ve become both a practitioner and noted scholar on Thelema, did your own personal journey in occultism begin there, or did you first dabble in other magic systems or paths first? How did you start out on your path?

ML My journey began with a passionate study of philosophy which naturally led to exploring religion more deeply and eventually getting into the occult.

Although my path as a seeker has

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brought me many places, accepting a label for myself or my beliefs has always been a struggle. I am not fond of putting myself in a box. I think a lot of people can relate to that.

Although I do now begrudgingly accept the label of Thelemite, a term for practitioners of Thelema that comes from The Book of the Law, I feel like I do much more than that. I am not confined by that label. I have always dabbled in other things and still do.

Some of those things include Paganism, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

MO What is one book—either magicinfluenced or otherwise—that you recommend all occultists read as part of their path?

ML My recommendations always depend on the interests and goals of someone in particular. We are all different people, so naturally our on-ramps to deeper study will look different. That being said, if I had to pick something from my personal favorites that I think more people will benefit from, then I am going to recommend Magick: Liber ABA, Book 4 by Aleister Crowley. This book is sometimes lovingly referred to as “the big blue brick.” It is a brick and that can be intimidating, but if it’s something you can stomach, then it is absolutely worth it.

MO The readership of Modern Occultist is a balance of both practitioners and academics (who look towards the history of occultism and esotericism from a strictly theoretical / historical perspective). In your own philosophy, what does being an “occultist” mean to you in today’s world.

difference where many ideas go to die because they don’t share the same context or meaning of words. The word “occultist” is one of those words. Other sources of great misunderstandings are terms like “new religious movement,” “left hand path,” and “Abrahamic.”

MO If someone is interested in learning more about the many different branches of occultism, but are unsure if Thelema is for them, what is a good way for a “newbie” to begin their own spiritual research into finding a system that’s best for them?

ML First of all, I want to tell every newbie welcome! If you feel an interest and calling to be here, then you belong here. If you are in the exploratory p h a s e , t h e n I s a y ex p l o re ! Yo u w o n ’ t know if a shoe fits until you try it on, so get to trying things on. Try out different rituals and practices and see how they feel. Thelema is an open p r a c t i c e . Yo u d o n ’ t h a ve to b e b o r n i n to Thelema in order to dabble and try out some things. Some rituals I suggest trying out are Saying Will over your main meal of the day as well as a daily solar adoration ritual called Liber Resh vel Helios. Both of these rituals are f o u n d i n m y b o o k , T h e H o l y Ye a r o f Thelema: A Guide to the Ritual Calendar of Aleister Crowley's Tradition.

I also have a video demonstration of b o t h o f t h e s e o n m y Yo u Tu b e c h a n n e l that may be helpful especially to more v i s u a l l e a r n e r s . M y Yo u Tu b e l i n k i s : www.youtube.com/@MaeviusLynn

ML I have a foot in both the academic world and the world of practitioners, so I sympathize with the needs and interests of both. To me the best words and definitions are ones that quickly and effectively communicate an idea.

Academics often have a very different frame of reference and context than practitioners. It is in this gulf of

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with Lon Milo DuQuette

Lon Milo DuQuette is a living legend.

An author, musician, and one of the world's foremost authorities on Aleister Crowley, Thelema, Kabbalah, and the Western magical tradition, he serves as Deputy Grand Master of Ordo Templi Orientis U.S.A. But he’s also a hell of a guitarist and storyteller, and has a great sense of humor.

Modern Occultist was able to catch up with him regarding a few, seemingly, unrelated topics: his Hollywood excursions in the 1960s, Scientology, and his own path towards enlightenment…

M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T We first connected due to my research on Jack Parsons and L. Ron Hubbard— but you shared an amazing Kenneth Anger story with me, and I was hoping you could relay it for our readers?

LON MILO DUQUETTE (Laughs) I took Michael Powell to a screening at the Academy Theater—I just didn't know who he was at the time.

He was this distinguished-looking man in a cardigan sweater, and we just called him “Mikey.” At some point during the evening, Mikey gets up to go to the bathroom, and while he's gone, the place is filling up—and I mean filling up with what looked like a cast of characters straight out of Sunset Boulevard. Kenneth Anger was there.

And then, one of these really glorious “swans”—you know the type, four-

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T H E TA ROT A RC H I T E C T : H OW T O B E C O M E T H E MASTER BUILDER OF YOUR SPIRITUAL TEMPLE & YO U N G A L E I S T E R C ROW L E Y A N D T H E M AG I C I A N ’ S R E VO LT : A N OV E L ( W I T H J I M B R AT KOW S K Y ) RED WHEEL / WEISER, 2025 & 2026

hundred years old, still beautiful like Gloria Swanson and magnificent— decides she wants Mikey's seat. So, Kenneth Anger leans over and says, “That seat is taken.” And this woman looks at him and says—and I love this — she says, “Is it taken by anyone?” And Anger says, without missing a beat, “Only the director of The Red Shoes!”

And that's when I realized — that's Michael Powell. That's who I'd brought to the thing. He just hadn't made a big d e a l o f w h o h e w a s — a l m o s t n o e g o . Yo u don't hear about that a lot.

MO I don’t mind sharing that my new book’s central thesis is Hubbard’s apparent plundering of Aleister Crowley’s legitimate Thelema writings—then watering it down and presenting it in a pseudo-Science Fiction stew, of sorts.

Is the Hubbard/Crowley connection genuine, in your view — and how direct was it?

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That's common knowledge—or common lore, at least—among modern occultists.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist—no pun intended towards Parsons!—to see that [Hubbard] pulled passages, sometimes full sections, out of work that was most available at the time.

Magick in Theory and Practice is the obvious source. I can't quote you chapter and verse, but the mirrors are there for anyone who does a little homework.

tologist reading that one without it raising too many flags. And given Hubbard's narcissism, he would only have recommended shorter books anyway—to make sure people had time to read his books, you know.

And what's interesting—what may actually be helpful to you — is the question of what Hubbard would have had access to. If you go back to the original reading lists for Dianetics, some of that material has come out through WikiLeaks. He had Book Four on a list of required reading for new members, at least in the early 1950s— but he stopped that fairly quickly!

LMD P a r a m a h a n s a Yo g a n a n d a — r i g h t o f f t h e top. Though I'd have to give a prologue figure, and that would be Dr. Timothy Leary. I was in high school in Nebraska —I was in wasteland, okay?—and I was on the school newspaper, so we had access to Life, Look, Time, everything.

And there was this piece, called something like “The God Pill,” about what Leary and Albert [Richard Alpert, later Ram Dass] were doing. I had been a fairly outspoken atheist since about the age of four. George Carlin said he reached the age of reason at six—I was a little ahead of schedule. But the second I read that article, I thought. “If I ever get a chance to try that LSD stuff, I am absolutely going to do it.”

“From the minute I wake up and hobble around with the various aches and pains a seventy-sevenyear-old man has, I express my gratitude to the big, cool, smooth singularity. And I somehow feel that I'm thanking myself—if that makes any sense.

That one little connection puts everything else in perspective.”

Now, Book Four is actually quite remarkable. Crowley's conception of it was: “Part One” was Mysticism, “Part Two” was Magic, “Part Three” was what's now published as Magick in Theory and Practice, and “Part Four” was the equivalent of The Equinox of the Gods—the story of the reception of The Book of the Law. But that full version was never published as a single volume until the '80s or '90s. What Hubbard was most likely referring to when he said “Book Four” was just the first two parts—the Mysticism and Magic essays—which were published separately by Sangreal Sodality Press, out of Texas, as a beautiful little artbound edition. I can easily see a Scien-

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MO If you had to name one major figure— someone you knew personally or simply read—who first inspired you to begin your spiritual path, who would it be?

So, the second I graduated from high school, I made a beeline back to California, where I'd been born. I went to Orange Coast College—the most psychedelic party school in the universe, I'm fairly sure. I was a drama major just so I could learn to act like a student! [Laughs] I didn't even take enough credits for a student deferment.

The war was going on, and when I got letters from the service, I just threw them away. I was playing folk music at a place called the Barbary Coast, and I went into the bathroom and there was this surfer character—very pleasant looking young man—who said, “Would you like to buy some LSD?” Well, I sure would! Now, I don't want to say I “saw God” on LSD and all that, But I realized that inside here was so much bigger than even outside there. And at the same time, culturally, the Beatles were into Eastern philosophy, and that got me exploring. Now, one of the earliest b o o k s w a s P a r a m a h a n s a Yo g a n a n d a ' s A u t o b i o g r a p h y o f a Yo g i , a n d t h a t w a s

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my introduction to not only the tradition, but to what study actually means to people. It's not just theory or scripture—here was a guy who just grew up to be a saint. So that got me into reading the Bhagavad Gita, and then the Upanishads, and then one thing led to another. For years I wanted to be a first-class Eastern mystic. But I realized I'm just hard-wired a little differently, because I'm such a Western nerd—I like stuff outside of myself to work with, even if it's inner stuff. And that's when Kabbalah and magic came in. It's Western Eastern mysticism, really.

structurally, a little more consciously. I see in a lot of younger writers that flow isn't always there. But I like that each sentence is its own thing. And very often I'm working on two or three projects at the same time—I'll work on one until I'm burned out on it, then get a drink of water, and pick up the other project, and I'm totally full of fresh new energy. All I have to do is change the subject.

MO When you sit down to write, do you consider it a spiritual practice—a meditation, even? And, if so, do you do any kind of banishing or blessing before you begin?

LMD I don't like giving people advice—I really don't think it's anybody's business. But I can tell you what I do!

For my own mental health, I've found it convenient, at least for now, to wrap all of the concepts of the singularity of consciousness—the universe that people call “God”—into the form of the Hindu god Ganesha—just because it's a form I can pour the infinite into and feel comfortable with.

LMD Well, first of all, it's not “work” work.

Just like when a person prays, they assume there's an ear to hear it. If I don't have a deadline, I don't have an ear to hear it. So, deadlines are important.

I may spend eight or ten hours on two or three sentences — just to make them sound like they came off the top of my head. Here's how it actually happens: let's say I write four pages into something, just to prime the pump. The next time I sit down to write, I read it from the very, very beginning. And then, like the moving lines in an I Ching hexagram, one moves into the next and I know what's coming up next—I'm hearing it for the first time myself. And then I do four more pages. I don't count. And then the next day I start from the very beginning again. So, I can move along pretty fast for the first three weeks, until you have to reread the entire book just to get started.

Hemingway did the same thing—reread the chapters every day, not only for consistency, but because there's a music to it—a flow, a rhythm. Even if it doesn't rhyme, there's a poetry to it.

The ear I'm writing for is my own ear, and I think being a musician has s o m e t h i n g to d o w i t h t h a t . Yo u a p p ro a c h putting sentences together a little more

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MO Is there something you yourself practice daily that you'd consider essential?

And almost from the minute I wake up and hobble around with the various aches and pains a seventy-seven-yearold man has, I express my gratitude to the big, cool, smooth singularity. And I somehow feel that I'm thanking myself— if that makes any sense. That one little connection puts everything else in perspective. And all through the day, I recognize not only my own fortunateness to simply be, but also my responsibility to do what I can to be—as I guess everybody has always called it— the light of the world.

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THE REVELATIONS of

AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE The Occultist Who Used Art to Bring Manifestations into Reality From the Editors of Modern Occultist

You’ve almost certainly encountered Austin Osman Spare without knowing it.

If you’ve ever written a desire in a sentence, crossed out the repeating letters, woven the remainder into a symbol, charged it in a moment of mental blankness, and then deliberately forgotten what it meant—you were using Spare’s method. If you’ve come across the phrase "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" in a chaos magic context, you were operating inside a paradigm that Spare’s work made possible. If you’ve read Peter Carroll’s Liber Null—the foundational text of the movement this very issue is devoted to—you were reading a book that Carroll himself described as having been shaped, at its root, by a reading of Spare.

And yet Spare—an artist as dedicated to his craft as he was to his occultist leanings—spent the last thirty years of his life in a damp basement flat in South London, surrounded by cats, and

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painting portraits for pub regulars in exchange for drinking money.

When he died on May 15, 1956—at sixty-nine, of heart failure—he was so thoroughly unknown to the wider world that the art establishment he’d briefly dazzled at seventeen had entirely forgotten he existed.

He left in 1905 without a qualification, but by then it barely mattered: his father had quietly submitted two of his drawings to the Royal Academy summer exhibition, one of which was accepted. Spare was seventeen. The press, delighted, declared him the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the show.

The occult world, fortunately, has a longer memory. And the story of how Austin Osman Spare went from being the most celebrated young artist in Edwardian England to a basement-dwelling hermit— and then, posthumously, to the acknowledged grandfather of one of the most influential magical movements of the twentieth century—is one of the stranger and more instructive tales in the history of Western esotericism.

The 1907 exhibition at the Bruton Gallery in London’s West End made the comparison to Beardsley official. The World called his inventive faculty "stupendous and terrifying in its creative flow of impossible horrors." The Observer declared his art "abnormal, unhealthy, wildly fantastic and unintelligible."—which Spare almost certainly received as a compliment. The art establishment had discovered a prodigy. The prodigy had other ideas about what he was going to do with his gifts.

The Boy from Snow Hill

Austin Osman Spare was born on 30 December 1886 in Snow Hill, London, the fourth surviving child of a City of London police constable. The family was working class in the most unambiguous sense—his father walked a beat; his mother managed the household.

There was nothing in Spare’s background to predict what he would become, except the drawing. By the time he was twelve, he was attending evening classes at the Lambeth School of Art, working days at Powell’s glassworks in Whitefriars Street. Two visitors who happened to see his sketches at the glassworks were sufficiently impressed to recommend him for a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington.

His career at the RCA was characteristically defiant. He was dissatisfied with the teaching, truanted constantly, and was disciplined by his tutors for a drawing style—obsessed with clear, sinuous line, heavily influenced by Aubrey Beardsley and the Art Nouveau movement—that ran counter to everything the College emphasized.

The relationship between Austin Osman Spare and Aleister Crowley is one of those productive collisions between two titanic egos that was probably never going to end in anything but mutual exasperation —and was consequential for Western esotericism precisely because of it.

Crowley encountered Spare’s work at the Bruton Gallery in 1907 and was immediately captivated, declaring it a message from the Divine.

He became a patron, championed Spare’s art, and brought him into the orbit of the A∴A∴—his magical order. Spare contributed illustrations to Crowley’s The Equinox. But the association was never comfortable, and it didn’t last. Spare was constitutionally incapable of subordinating his magical instincts to anyone else’s system—least of all a system as elaborate, hierarchical, and Crowley-centric as Thelema. By the time Spare published The Book of Pleasure in 1913 —his masterwork, the text that contained the fully developed theory of sigils, the Alphabet of Desire, the Death Posture, and the Zos Kia Cultus—he had effectively declared his philosophical independence.

Crowley, for his part, was not gracious about it.

The split was instructive. Where Crowley built a cathedral—an enormous, intricate, theologically ambitious structure of grades and correspondences and Holy Books—Spare built something closer to a lean-to: a system stripped to its absolute essentials, requiring nothing but the practitioner’s own mind and body. No pantheon unless you wanted one. No grade system. No lineage. Just technique, and the radical insistence that technique was all that mattered. Kenneth Grant, who later became Spare’s great champion, put it plainly: Spare’s system "tends to dispense with tradition rather than draw upon it."—which was, of course, precisely the point.

The Book of Pleasure

The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love): The Psychology of Ecstasy is

genuinely one of the stranger and more original texts in the Western magical tradition—and because its strangeness is inseparable from its brilliance.

The core proposition is deceptively simple: the subconscious mind is the seat of all magical power, and the conscious mind—with its doubts, its second-guessing, its insistence on coherent narrative—is the primary obstacle to accessing it. Spare’s solution was the sigil: a symbol constructed from the letters of a stated desire, stripped of repetition and woven into a glyph that no longer visibly resembles its source. The sigil is then charged through gnosis—an altered state of consciousness in which the conscious censor is briefly suspended— and crucially, then forgotten. The subconscious receives the instruction and acts on it, unimpeded by the ego’s interference.

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This is the system that Peter J. Carroll would later identify as the

mechanism underlying all chaos magic operations. It’s also, in its essentials, the system used by Grant Morrison in constructing The Invisibles—and by millions of practitioners today who have never heard the name Austin Osman Spare. (The internet, it turns out, is extremely good at propagating techniques that require nothing but a pen and a piece of paper.) The “Alphabet of Desire” took the system further: a personal alphabet in which each character encoded a "sensation-thinking," an aesthetic concept localized in past memory, which could be used to summon elemental forces and navigate the deeper strata of the unconscious. And the “Death Posture”—Spare’s most unsettling practical innovation—was a method of achieving gnosis through the deliberate suspension of the body’s ordinary physical rhythms, inducing a state that Spare described, with characteristic obliqueness, as "the precarious funambulatory pathway between ecstasies."

Spare called the system the Zos Kia Cultus: Zos being the body considered as a whole, the material alembic; Kia being the Atmospheric “I”—the limitless, formless selfhood that Zos was forever seeking to contact. The aim of the Work, in Spare’s formulation, was the moment of union between the two: a flash of pure gnosis in which the personal ego dissolved into something both more specific and more vast than ordinary consciousness could contain. He called this the “Neither-Neither”—a deliberate paradox, a state that could be approached only obliquely, because direct acknowledgment would immediately allow the ego to conceive from it, and thereby falsify it.

After the First World War—in which Spare served as an official war artist, producing work of unflinching directness that the War Office found inconveniently honest—the trajectory of his public career

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entered a long decline that is painful to trace. He attempted to revive his art magazine Form; it failed. He tried again with The Golden Hind, in partnership with Clifford Bax; it failed too. The surrealists briefly rehabilitated his reputation in the 1930s, recognizing in his automatic drawing and his imagery of monstrous, erotic transformation a precursor to their own project—but Spare, characteristically, declined to be incorporated into their movement on their terms, and the moment passed.

The Blitz destroyed his home. He moved to a damp basement flat in Brixton, then to the Elephant and Castle, then to Borough—always South London, always working class, always further from the galleries that had once competed for his work. He sold portraits in local pubs for whatever the sitter could afford. He wrote manuscripts that went unpublished. He accumulated cats. Members of the public, having read a human-interest feature in The Leader about his circumstances, mailed him tins of food. Spare, however, continued to work; he continued to practice. He showed no interest in rescue.

Enter Kenneth Grant

In the spring of 1949, a young woman named Steffi Grant introduced herself to Spare at one of his pub shows. She brought her husband, Kenneth Grant—a former secretary to Aleister Crowley who had since developed his own highly idiosyncratic magical system, involving currents from beyond the solar system and a distinctly Lovecraftian cosmology. Spare and the Grants became close friends, sharing pubs and books and a mutual enthusiasm for the stranger corners of occult theory.

Grant’s influence on Spare’s late work was significant: with his encouragement, Spare began producing artwork with titles like

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“Walpurgis Vampire” and “Satiated Succubi,” and claimed to have encountered a group of female witches on the bus one evening, en route to the Sabbath. Whether the encounter was literal or visionary is a question Spare left deliberately unanswered.

But Grant’s most consequential contribution to Spare’s legacy was posthumous. After Spare’s death, Grant became his primary champion—preserving and publicizing the manuscripts Spare had bequeathed him, and writing about Spare extensively in his Typhonian Trilogies. Grant’s Spare is a figure of genuine mythological grandeur: a dark sorcerer initiated in childhood by a witch-mother descended from Salem, a visionary who saw entities in the spaces between spaces, a magician of powers so extreme that one of his atavisms allegedly caused the suicide of one witness and the insanity of another. The biographical evidence for some of this is, shall we say, impressionistic. But Grant understood something that the art establishment had missed entirely: that Spare’s work was not merely interesting, but foundational—that it described, more economically and more honestly than almost anything else in the Western tradition, how magic actually works.

Today, sigil magic is—as one recent commentator observed—"the most widely practiced magical technique in the Western world." It is used by chaos magicians and Wiccans, by pop artists and comic writers, by teenagers who found it on social media and have never opened a grimoire. Grant Morrison encoded it into The Invisibles and talked about it in interviews that reached an audience Spare could never have imagined. Carroll built the theoretical architecture of Chaos Magick on its foundations. Phil Hine, Dave Lee, Stephen Mace —the whole generation of chaos practitioners whose names fill the acknowledgments pages of this magazine—were working within a paradigm that Spare had established in a 1913 grimoire that sold perhaps a few hundred copies in his lifetime.

When Carroll encountered Kenneth Grant’s 1972 The Magical Revival —with its substantial chapter on Spare—the effect, as Carroll later described, was a "revelation of the first order." Here was a system requiring no elaborate symbolism, claiming no ancient lineage—just the practitioner, the sigil, and an altered state wholly unique to the individual. Liber Null was already taking shape.

Austin Osman Spare died on May 15, 1956, of a heart condition that had been aggravated by years of poverty, the after-effects of bronchitis, anemia, gallstones, and hypertension—a perfect storm of accumulated neglect, both self-inflicted and otherwise. He was sixtynine. He left behind a body of visual art now recognized as among the most original produced in twentieth-century Britain, a small shelf of magical texts of extraordinary density and originality, and a method of practical magic so elegant and so stripped of unnecessary apparatus that it has propagated itself across the world with almost no institutional support.

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“A LIFE IN CHAOS” PETER J. CARROLL (1953–2026) From the Editors of Modern Occultist

It’s with deep sadness that, while preparing our issue devoted to Chaos Magick, the man largely responsible for its widespread popularity and the modern evolution of occult theory and passed away.

Peter J. Carroll died on April 22 in southwest England—yet he died as he lived: quietly, but having already made his fair share of extraordinary noise. In the nearly half-century between his emergence from a squat in Deptford with a pamphlet that most of the occult establishment of the time found either baffling or offensive, and the posthumous publication of his final anthology, Carroll had accomplished something that very few people in the history of Western esotericism can claim: he had built a new paradigm from scratch and lived long enough to see it taken up by the next generation. Very few occult philosophers over the past century and a half could claim the same; Aleister Crowley—while having expanding Thelema into an underground global phenomenon—was still struggling to complete what he deemed “the Great Work” upon his 1947

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death, never having lived down his torturous reputation as “the wickedest man in the world.” Likewise, Austin Osman Spare established his reputation for art over esotericism during his lifetime, riddled with a perfect storm of anemia, bronchitis, gall stones, and hypertension when he left the material plane in 1956; Jack Parsons, of course, blew himself up in his home laboratory, having lost his fortune to a then-budding self-help guru named L. Ron Hubbard. (A few centuries earlier, the whole crew might have found themselves burned at the stake.)

death, never having lived down his torturous reputation as “the wickedest man in the world.” Likewise, Austin Osman Spare established his reputation for art over esotericism during his lifetime, riddled with a perfect storm of anemia, bronchitis, gall stones, and hypertension when he left the material plane in 1956; Jack Parsons, of course, blew himself up in his home laboratory, having lost his fortune to a then-budding self-help guru named L. Ron Hubbard. (A few centuries earlier, the whole crew might have found themselves burned at the stake.)

Carroll, however, kept his private life very private and let his thoughts speak for themselves through a series of works that recontextualized how to the universe works—and how it could be manipulated. The tradition he called Chaos Magick is now practiced, in one form or another, on every inhabited continent. It’s influenced the trajectory of modern ceremonial magic, Wicca, witchcraft, academic occultism, pop culture (Grant Morrison, we’re looking at you!), and a significant portion of the internet’s esoteric communities. Never one to judge, Carroll may have found most of that gratifying—and some of it mildly amusing.

Carroll, however, kept his private life very private and let his thoughts speak for themselves through a series of works that recontextualized how to the universe works—and how it could be manipulated. The tradition he called Chaos Magick is now practiced, in one form or another, on every inhabited continent. It’s influenced the trajectory of modern ceremonial magic, Wicca, witchcraft, academic occultism, pop culture (Grant Morrison, we’re looking at you!), and a significant portion of the internet’s esoteric communities. Never one to judge, Carroll may have found most of that gratifying—and some of it mildly amusing.

The Scientist at the Threshold

In his foreword to a 2022 Weiser Classics reissue of Carroll’s seminal work, Liber Null & Psychonaut, Ronald Hutton placed Carroll in the highest possible company. According to Hutton, there have been three leading occult theorists in modern Western Esotericism: Eliphas Lévi in the mid-nineteenth century; the above-mentioned Mr. Crowley in the early twentieth century; Carroll in the late twentieth century, who placed the same aims of Levi and Crowley within what Hutton called “an ultra-modern, or post-modern, context of cosmology and morality.”

He drew from quantum physics and chaos mathematics—fields which, as Carroll delighted in pointing out, the underlying reality of the universe had turned out to be far stranger and less dogmatic than anyone had suspected. If quantum indeterminacy meant that causality was an approximation rather than a law, and if chaos theory meant that butterfly effects could produce genuine unpredictability all the way up from the quantum level to mundane, every day life, then the universe was, in a very real sense, a playground where magic was possible—not as a violation of natural law, but as an expression of it.

No one since, perhaps, Cornelius Agrippa had had the stones to use science to prove magick was real—and tangible.

Rather spot-on, I would think. What distinguished Carroll from virtually every previous magickal theorist of the Western tradition was his scientific formation; like the alchemists of old, he’d worked his way into magickal thinking from years of study in the natural sciences.

Peter James Carroll was born in England in 1953, studied chemistry at Queen Mary’s College in London in the early 1970s, completed teacher training, and, ultimately, spent a number of years as a science teacher. (Where was he when I was flunking Earth Science?)

But this earlier career, rather foster a disregard for the spiritual goals of humankind, inspired it, shaping his approach to magick more fundamentally than any of his fellow modern occultists. Where Lévi was a priest and Crowley a poet and adventurer, Carroll was, in Hutton’s view, a scientist. He looked at the Western magical tradition the way a chemist looks at a set of experiments: empirically, skeptically, and with a genuine curiosity about the underlying mechanisms—not unlike Jack Parsons, in his own dual approaches to Thelema and rocketry.

But Carroll’s result was extraordinary—a magickal philosophy unlike anything that had come before it (even that of Austin Osman Spare, regarded as the “father” of Chaos Magickal theory). Carroll voiced his acceptance of the reality of magickal effects in the same pragmatic, results-oriented way that a working scientist accepts the reality of a phenomenon before fully understanding its causation— and then set about explaining those effects in the most honest and practical terms a wide readership could comprehend.

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Let There Be Chaos

The history of modern Chaos Magick begins in the 1970s in a derelict five-story apartment block in Deptford, South London...

Speedwell House was meant to be rubble, but was delegated to student housing pending demolition when it attracted a large community of squatters, artists, amateur musicians, anarchists, and occult experimenters—and had been a stomping ground for bohemians since Elizabethan times (Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a pub just down the street) and, in that time, had shed little of its roughness. While living there, Carroll kept an iron crowbar near the door—referred to by his Speedwell neighbors as the Ateph Wand of Steel—which he still treasured decades later. He’d arrived in London’s occult scene like many during that time: through reprints of Israel Regardie’s Golden Dawn volumes that flooded the underground bookshops, and Crowley’s original works (namely reprints of The Equinox), which were becoming available for the first time in over half a century. Kenneth Grant’s 1972 publication of The Magical Revival, which devoted a substantial section to Austin Osman Spare, sealed the deal. For Carroll, reading about Spare’s sigilwork was a revelation of the first order. Here was a system of magic that required no elaborate symbolism, claimed no ancient lineage or theological underpinning—just the practitioner, their desire, the sigil, and an altered state wholly unique to the individual.

And from this basic premise, Carroll built his own methodology.

But Carroll wasn’t the only would-be occultist that gravitated to South London at that time. Charlie Brewster, who had been initiated into Thelemic Freemasonry in 1968 and had spent years practicing what he described as “freeform magic of the same character as the as yet unrecognized Chaos Magic” (and who later dated the precise origins of the system to the Deptford Olympics Goat Roast of 1976— a barbecue block-party that had taken place behind Speedwell House, coinciding with the Montreal Olympics, featuring a goat from the Halal butchers on Deptford High Street and a live punk band.)

There was also Ray Sherwin, who ran a small publishing house called Morton Press from his home in Yorkshire; soon, he and Carroll were running The New Equinox—a Thelemic and Kabbalistic magazine

named in honor of Crowley’s legendary periodical—with Carroll’s writing a mainstay within its pages. By 1978, he had completed the first draft of his foundational text, Liber Null, built upon Chaos Magick principle he’d first laid out within the magazine. A hybrid of modern occult theory and “training program” for a new generation of ceremonial magicians, Sherman published a limited run of onehundred copies—which were quickly sold-out, calling for another printing almost immediately.

This “White Version,” as it came to be known, was Carroll at his straight-forward, minimalistic best: a system stripped of mystification—no appeal to ancient authority, no symbolic system except a basic kit of magical operation—namely, the reader’s mind; just technique, and the radical insistence that technique was all that mattered.

Liber Null and the New Paradigm

Carroll’s theories fit perfectly into the zeitgeist of the time. By the late 1970s, Western magick and its tradition was still largely operating within the framework assembled by the Golden Dawn in the 1890s: a vast, intricate symbolic system derived primarily from Kabbalah, incorporating Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, Egyptian mythology, astrology, and a dozen other currents. As Israel Regardie himself attested, the process could be labyrinthian, with its elaborate hierarchy of correspondences requiring years of study before one could confidently perform even basic operations. True, Aleister Crowley had expanded and intensified this system and, in the 1950s, Gerald Gardner’s Wicca had simplified and brought a much-needed feminine presence. But the basic assumption—that magical operation required a fixed dogma based upon concrete symbolism and set correspondences—that the entities invoked were objectively real, and that there was a right way to do things and a wrong way— remained largely intact.

Like the scientist he was, Carroll attacked these assumptions in a decidedly surgical manner. Magick, he argued, was a technology for producing results by working on the subconscious mind and, through it, on the laws of probability themselves. It didn’t require any particular symbolic system (any system would do, as long as there was consistency) because the symbols were tools, not truths. The entities invoked in ritual were useful fictions, archetypes and visualizations useful for focusing one’s intent, and accessing the deeper levels of the mind—not inhabitants of a physical spiritual world to only be approached using old hierarchical protocols. Within Carroll’s system, what mattered most was gnosis—the altered state of consciousness in which ordinary mental interference was suspended and the magical charge could be implanted cleanly. (How you got to gnosis was almost irrelevant: meditation, fasting, intense physical exertion, sexual excitation, fear, or really anything that sufficiently disrupted the normal chattering of the conscious mind would serve)

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

It was a formulation Carroll borrowed from Hassan-i Sabbah—who had, previously, inspired both Friedrich Nietzsche and William S. Burroughs. But for Carroll, the observation was more technical: no symbolic system, no theology, no model of reality is true in the sense of being the final account of how things actually are. Under this system, every model is a tool, allowing the magician to adopt whatever paradigm is most useful for the work at hand, then setting it

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aside when its usefulness has run out. Carroll called this ability to shift fluidly between paradigms the “sleight of mind,” and identified it as the master skill underlying all true magical competence.

Psychonaut, published in 1982 (later couple with Liber Null for the landmark 1987 Weiser edition), expanded Carroll’s system with an account of group magical work, crafting a complete theoretical framework for understanding the mechanics of enchantment and divination. Its chapter on “Chemognosis” also acknowledged the role of psychoactive substances in magical practice at a time when the magical mainstream was on the fence of using chemical agents within ceremonial work. Prior to the book’s publication, in a 1978 issue of The New Equinox, Carroll and Sherwin had announced the formation of the “Illuminates of Thanateros”—the first Chaos Magick order—and soon, Liber Null and Pychonaut were viewed by the IOT (or, “the Pact,” as it also came to be known) as seminal texts. Both the books and the Order set to disrupt all preconceived notions of ceremonial magic and its workings. Within in IOT, there was no Grand Poobah in possession of secret knowledge unavailable to the lower grades; rather, a working group of practitioners testing Chaos Magick methods and reporting back with results, organized on what Carroll later described as a cellular and decentralized model” inspired partly by the structure of the IRA and partly by his “reading of chaos theory itself.”

Around the time of the OIT’s founding, Carroll went backpacking in India, spending months at the Tibetan Library in Dharamsala. He continued to Australia before, finally, returning to England after two years. Reinvigorated, he and Sherwin buckled down in expanding the IOT and—by the middle of the decade—had started temples in England, Austria, Australia, Germany, Switzerland and, in 1988, the United States. Working in tandem, they had used Sherwin’s publishing house to create an official magazine for the Order in 1986 —Chaos International—sparking debate on Chaos Magick and its innovations all over the world. (Regular contributors included Carroll, Phil Hine, Dave Lee, Stephen Mace, Lionel Snell, Carl Abrahamsson, and dozens of others who helped to define the new traditions and mechanics. The 1987 Weiser publication of Liber Null & Psychonaut as a combined volume—secured after Carroll sent copies to Samuel Weiser with a recommendation from Israel Regardie via Gerald Suster—solidified Carroll’s place in the canon of Western esotericism.

that made perfect sense, given the intellectual affinities between Carroll’s paradigm-shifting and Wilson’s guerrilla ontology and reality tunnels) and continued to write and champion the next generations of Chaos Magick theorists; he founded and taught online through the Arcanorium College, and contributed essays and introductions to works heavily inspired by his example. (One such book—the upcoming The Left-Hand Path of Magick: The Definitive Reference Guide to the History and Practice—written by Modern Occultist contributor, Dr. Angela Puca, includes one of Carroll’s final offerings.)

The year before his passing, Carroll edited This Is Chaos: Embracing the Future of Magic, representing, in the fullest sense, a modern testament to the tradition he’d built. He contributed two essays of his own—“The Origins of Chaos Magic,” a compressed history of Western esotericism culminating in his Quantum–Neo–Pagan paradigm; and the shorter, aphoristic introduction “This Is Chaos”— then assembled fourteen more from practitioners spanning four decades of theory. The book also includes a foreword by Ronald Hutton, who, by identifying Chaos Magick as “the most dynamic form of ceremonial magic in the contemporary Western world,” also rightly places its founder within the first rank of Western magical theorists.

Today, Liber Null & Psychonaut is one of the most widely read occult texts of the past forty years, while the “Chaostar” appears on jewelry, tattoos, album covers, and millions of social media profiles (as well as this issue’s Modern Occultist logo). The core principles of Chaos Magick—belief as a tool rather than a commitment, paradigm shifting as a skill, and gnosis as the mechanism underlying all magickal operation—have permeated the workings and imaginations of modern occultists so thoroughly that many practitioners are operating on theories and mechanics introduced by Peter J. Carroll— whether they’ve even read him or not.

Carroll himself would probably have been fine with that. He was constitutionally indifferent to the trappings of magickal authority— the lineages and dogmas—preferring a modern system designed to make its users independent of them.

He then spent the rest of his life refining that system and watching what others did with it. He will be greatly missed.

During the next decades, he released such classics as Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic and Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magick, along others.

In 1995, Carroll announced his retirement from the IOT in a Chaos International article titled “The Ice War”—stepping down, as he put it, from his dual roles as “magus and pontiff of chaos.”

Carroll’s work following Liber Null & Psychonaut is less well known than it deserves to be—particularly 1992’s Liber Kaos: Chaos Magic for the Pandaemonaeon, in which Carroll introduced an eight-color model of magickal types, as well as a mature, finalized approach to his full Chaos framework. (The “Chaostar,” or “Octaris”—eightpointed star recognized as Chaos Magick’s primary symbol—is given its most definitive explanation within in the chapter, “Principia Chaotica.” The Apophenion (2008) and The Octavo (2010) contain some of the most sustained attempts by any practicing occultist to seriously engage with the implications of quantum indeterminacy and many-worlds interpretations for magical theory, while 2014’s Epoch (2014) brings his Chaos Tarot with digital artwork by Matt Kaybryn, brought his system of eight planetary archetypes into visual form.

In 2005, Carroll appeared as a Chaos Magick instructor at the Maybe Logic Academy at the invitation of Robert Anton Wilson (a pairing

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FEATURE

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MEMETICS FOR MAGICKIANS

GAVIN FOX

C h a o s m a g i c k . Tw o w o r d s t h a t have the potential to generate a hundred or more interrelated definitions, at least half of which are perceived to be in some way negative. Anyone who takes the time to look back to the early days of the movement, be it through small press books or surviving message board conversations, will quickly realise that the term has never really been set in stone, nor does it rely on moral judgement to legitimise its ritual. Brazen bulls in the spiritual china shop, chaotes burn with a Promethean fire that finds fuel in the beliefs, philosophies or fictions of others.

This lack of definition is as it should be, however. Despite all the written and spoken language that has coalesced around the system since the 1970’s, its iconoclastic heart still beats with tools designed to brute force change upon the inner and out world of the practitioner in line with their will. Results are king here.

Nothing more need be held sacred, nor should expected adherence to a single paradigm be allowed to stifle personal growth. Read the books. Do the research. But take only what resonates, before leaving the rest to the growing cultural pyre.

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ThIt could be argued that memetics as a concept has also gone through a similarly muddy path towards the present day. Originating with the work of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and used to describe the at the time radical view that ideas are spread through culture in a similar way to genes within a population, it was soon adopted by both politicians and corporations alike. The former weaponised language and image to fuel personal agendas, while the latter realised that the advertising which was core to their continued expansion had been reliant on that virally invasive mental vector all along.

A key concept in this transfer of ideas remains the cultural attractiveness of the spreader. There is a reason why social media influencers have such a hold within online spaces, leveraging manicured looks and management polished attitude to sway their audiences towards prepaid agendas on a regular basis. People tend to be more willing to take on board the talking points of those they already identify with in some way, and this is often used to pipeline the unwary down any number of potentially destructive paths.

Impactful negative events also generate a similar response as well, though this tends to be one of opposition instead of support of those memetic payloads. Trolling as a tool of undermining the status quo can work, though due to the naturally adversarial nature of those activities the results tend to be mixed. And yes, this manufactured tribalism can find a foothold in the mediocre too, because no matter how bad that band’s third comeback album turns out to be the audience will still turn up for the live show regardless.

As someone who has been openly working within the chaos magick space for the last two decades the concepts championed by occult authors such as Dave Lee or the late Peter J. Carroll resonate deeply within my vulpine mindset, allowing as they do for the kinds of experimentation that moves far beyond the ritual chamber and out into the real world. I have long sought to marry those already existing methodologies with the memetic, and the results form my own offering to that ever growing experimental blaze.

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The Trisphere model is complex in origin but simple in operation. As the name suggests there are three interlinked Nodes that it leverages within culture, at least one of which relies upon the physical realm to function, and all designed to generate change in line with the chaote’s will. In this the short lived Technopagan movement was correct in viewing the internet as a digital astral plane of sorts, and my personal model of magick copies much of their homework, while correcting a few errors in calculation along the way.

Node one, the Synthetic Sphere, is the easiest entry point for memetic payloads such as bare bones glyph based sigils and single image posts.

This is the internet, advertising and humour, quickly digested micro-inputs and throw away comments. Due to the somewhat overwhelming nature of the online space there is usually very little resistance or even scrutiny afforded to the data that the chaote adds to the cultural aggregate here.

Post, forget, harvest. Simple.

“From sigilised stickers adhered to the outside of derelict buildings within the urban eyeline to similarly encoded leaflets inserted into those free newspapers that lay stacked at certain larger commuter stations every morning, hiding the occult in plain sight can be surprisingly simple.”

Node two is the Systemic Sphere, and moves partly beyond the screen.

Here dwells fiction, narrative, pop culture fandoms and special interest groups. Basically discussion of all kinds. If the insertion was successful at the Synthetic stage, then the meme should be taking root as a talking point, generating both support and perhaps resistance in equal measure.

Remember that all interaction, both good and bad, can be used to empower the desire. The overall tone of the reception is of little concern.

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Node three is the Kinetic Sphere. Describing the real world consequences of those once once nebulous ideas, it forms a physical no man’s land of warring cultural constructs such as political ideologies, religious creeds and wealth versus poverty protests.

Direct physical action is take here, with this also being the realm in which most chaote’s would wish to see their earlier efforts bear fruit.

The street finds its own use for things after all.

It must be remembered that the three Nodes outlined here function as a continual circuit and not a sliding scale. due to the ever cyclical nature of information transfer within the model there is nothing stopping the results from reinserting themselves into the Synthetic after they have dwelled within the Kinetic. Many concepts both magickal and mundane go around multiple times during their lives, albeit fundamentally changed by their cultural journey towards eventual irrelevance.

At its core the Trisphere model is about empowering your spell work with the attention of others. This can take many forms, be it overt such as when Grant Morrison wrote himself into the Invisibles and lived the highs and lows of that hero’s journey first hand, or unexpected in a similar way to Alan Moore seeing Constantine tipping him a cheeky smile on the street after giving the archetypal gutter mage literary life. Invested, disinterested, oblivious and dreaming. The audience is the real key to manifesting desire here.

And yes, both of those author reported incidents would count as Systemic Sphere operations, falling as they do within the realms of pop culture and narrative while relying on the kind of large, paying audience that the average magickian can only dream of. Because in an ever saturated corporate media led landscape those kinds of iconic hypersigils tend to have a bar for entry that few can scramble over, so are best avoided unless the chaote is already well connected in those markets. The fundamental concept behind my Trisphere model revolves around creating the correct type of content as carrier for the desire and using the attention of others to feed that meme until it is later fired by the chaote themselves. The exact mechanism that is involved in birthing the outcome within reality is not fully defined of course. We are scholars, not gurus, and my position in this remains one of humble awe.

Perhaps there is more to the concept of a nebulous noosphere or interactive zeitgeist than most would assume, though. Some vast mental egregore created from the overmind of an entire species. A God of the Anthropocene snoring quietly as billions of voices chatter away in the dark. Hyperobject as baseline, and one that can be hacked if enough people interact with symbols capable of doing so.

Each stolen look a single spark kindling the fires of manifestation for the memetic magickian, preparing the woodpile of fate for its inevitable ignition. Such Lovecraftian ramblings aside, we must make peace with the fact that an actual metaphysical location which these viral desires are uploaded remains tantalisingly unknown, and much like all ritual work within the wider discipline of chaos magick itself there are only theories, never facts. Dogma has no place within the realm of the eight pointed star, though that is part of the benefit of dwelling within its boundaries.

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Of course, the entire Trisphere structure is little more than a trick in and of itself too, appealing to my personal biases and reflecting the memes which made me who I am. All chaotes by their very nature are sovereign beings, choosing to invest or withdraw attention as the need arises, so the details are less important than the value that can be derived from implementing these memetic tools along the way.

And the rest of this essay shows, the practical side of my pet paradigm remains more than worthy of your time.

When approaching the Synthetic Sphere it pays to play to the strengths of the platform that is being co-opted to feed desire. Most online interaction in the post message board era tends towards prioritising images on a scrolling home feed. As previously mentioned, the humble sigil is the easiest way to approach the digital astral via these reductionist avenues. Use a dedicated app or draw out your own, explicitly including the statement that the subconscious attention of others will aid in the manifestation of the chosen desire.

Then just post to any of the social media groups which cluster around those mystical ideas. Reactions will likely dry up quickly, as this kind of work is only effective in small doses. Though once a given threshold is reached, perhaps a predetermined number of interactions or even just a chronological endpoint a week or two after posting, charge and fire the sigil yourself as normal. It is here that the attention it was paid by others is melded with your own and used to kick open the doors of consensus reality, igniting the pyre and inserting the desire into the weave of fate.

More adventurous chaotes could try creating original art pieces instead. Hand drawn or digital, incorporating those glyphs into something more detailed tends to greatly multiply the amount of impact that it can generate. The longer someone looks at the memetic vector, the stronger the effect, after all. Those without the confidence to open their sketchbooks for the home audience can sidestep that need by crafting humorous or even heartfelt memes using existing open source art, especially those which reference a godform that is in some way aligned with the desires at hand. Short video can work as well, though the addition of any form of narrative beyond a sarcastic one liner will move it firmly into Systemic Sphere work instead. Indeed memetic insertion at this second Node tends to be the most difficult for non-creatives, though far from impossible.

The domain of pop culture, here lies trashy paperback novels, as well as comics, television and the studio based film media of old.

Fandoms as kindling, when the correct accelerants are applied.

As anyone who has approached editors with pitches in the past will attest, breaking into the physical literary space is extremely difficult.

This is the case across the board, even just at both magazine or anthology level, and all the harder for those who create fiction as opposed to researching fact. A way to sidestep that issue lies in self publishing, though the trade-off there comes in the form of an inevitably reduced reach.

For those who are looking to empower their sigils without creating a written legacy all their own, the medium of forum fan fiction can

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can produce striking results. Subtly weaving yourself into an existing world can, if handled gently, at least partly emulate Grant Morrison’s efforts to create a hypersigil within the pages of the Invisibles. It works best when remaining a background character, however. The owner of a bar the hero visits one random rainy autumn day, the driver of the sports car passing in the street. Subtlety is key, as no one likes a Mary Sue.

perimeters in play. Instructions on duration, reassurances that even a cellphone photo of a hand drawn sigil is more than good enough to be part of the movement, outreach to those that have never slung a spell through how-to guides or step by step demonstrations. Creating cohesion is key, so it falls to the organiser to keep both the energy circulating and people motivated to continue as time marches on.

Returning to classic memetics for a moment, it must be accepted that the average chaote, no matter how physically fit or erudite in conversation, is not an attractive cultural spreader. Efforts to court favour outside of the already magickally minded tend to be met with an almost blanket hostility, though in the spaces where indifference reigns headway can be made.

As advertising agencies can attest, the unguarded mind is just a dry scrubland awaiting whatever sweeping conflagration pays them the most to ignite. The idea of small press ‘zines is also attractive, blending as it does the graphical aspirations of the Synthetic with the narrative of the Systemic, though should it subsequently see psychical distribution it then becomes a Kinetic Sphere operation by default. This is not a hard and fast demarcation, however, and digital offerings that create enough offline discussion also belong to that third Node. Seeing your magick step away from the screen is the deciding factor.

Action within the third Node, that of the Kinetic, occurs once the sigilbomb reaches its final day. A decentralised group charging ensues, practitioners from multiple different disciplines all firing both their own glyphs as well as any others that resonated with them during the previous week of posts.

Timing and methodology for this are deliberately kept loose within the twenty-four hour period, as it plays to the individual strengths and commitments of those taking part. The only goal is to foster mass material plain action on a potentially unlimited scale. Oh yes, it most definitely gets the community moving, to the point that I have had events go so well that a surplus of energy remained hanging in the air once the solstice deadline had been and gone. Here the Kinetic feeds back into the Synthetic in previously unforeseen ways, because of such memes egregores are born. I should know, seeing as mine is still out there somewhere, in the online stacks, quietly humming away.

That said, it is not just group action that belongs here. While real world movements are an attractive target for memetic harvest, a single voice raised in the material realm can achieve a small amount of success.

From sigilised stickers adhered to the outside of derelict buildings within the urban eyeline to similarly encoded leaflets inserted into those free newspapers that lay stacked at certain larger commuter stations every morning, hiding the occult in plain sight can be surprisingly simple.

>_”Projekt”.. is the ghost of networks past. Copying the deliberately incorrect spelling designed to differentiate those sigilbombs from any of the other hashtags on the platform, it is my distillation of that decentralised and indeed cyber-utopian memetic essence that flows through these seven day pathworkings. A grinning skull merged with metallic blue server cabinets and neon green blinking terminal text, it is designed to be invoked by name at the start of similar open source digital spell work, smoothing the code and aiding in the success of the event. Optional of course, but worth a thought for sure.

Those with access to a heat press can design and cut sigils directly on to vinyl and apply to to baseball caps or shirts that are used for every day wear in the mundane realm while also sharing the original image in the digital, further colonising the same space that brands have so jealously guarded since the 20th Century. The rule of thumb here remains a subversion and assimilation of the tactics of the enemy, as well as a desire to utilise the techniques imprisoning the masses as the key to your own magickal freedom.

Chaos magick represents action, not introspection. The proof of the pudding is where you bury the spoon, and there we find my current favourite tool of memetic distribution. The sigilbomb. I have been running these for a while now, on a variety of different social media sites. Open access and free to enter, they represent a group working undertaken entirely by individuals. Usually lasting seven days and culminating with a mass charging on either Litha or Yule, the feedback from those who have taken part has been overwhelmingly positive.

Chaos magick is now and will always be a personal path to discovery. A journey towards inner growth and outer stability, one bruise at a time.

While sharing this Trisphere model for everyone is undeniably exciting, I am under no illusions memetic ritual will resonate with all chaotes across the board. But that is fine. As previously stated there are no sacred cows here, nor gurus seeking blind obedience.

Ours is the victory of adaption over dogma, laughing as we dance madly around the permacultural bonfire, lit torch blazing in either hand. My role here is just to share what I have achieved, passing those memes to others so that I may be remembered through them. And it will be an honour to witness my pet paradigm turned to charcoal by greater minds than my own eventually, though perhaps not just yet.

Node one, the Synthetic Sphere, is represented through the medium chosen for the event. BlueSky is my current platform of choice for these.

Some may prefer Mastodon, but the self hosted nature of that network made it potentially costly to take part. Digital sigil images are shared to a suitable hashtag so they can be easily browsed and collated by interested parties over the week, and should those tags garner enough support to trend site wide then all the better too.

The Systemic Sphere finds its voice in the evolving narrative underpinning the event. A little advertising know-how is of considerable help here, as even the loosest of user groups still require a brief understanding of the

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with Gavin Fox

M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T The Trisphere model—Synthetic, Systemic, and Kinetic—is one of the more genuinely original frameworks to emerge from the Chaos Magick community in recent years, and what immediately strikes the reader is the insistence that these three nodes function as a continuous circuit rather than a linear progression. A desire fired in the Kinetic can reinject itself into the Synthetic, fundamentally changed b y i t s c u l t u r a l j o u r n ey . Yo u w r i te t h a t “many concepts, both magickal and mundane, go around multiple times during their lives.” Can you give us a concrete example from your own practice where you witnessed that circuit complete an unexpected second or third rotation—and what it looked like when it did?

G AV I N F O X Well I am glad to hear that the Trisphere model resonated with you so deeply, and I hope it will be received with equal interest by your readers here too. Surprisingly enough it was my personal journey as an author that showed me the circuit was able to repeat in the first place, and that is by far the most interesting example that I can share.

One of the reasons I write under the name Gavin Fox is the latitude it allows me to insert myself into wider narratives. Through this I literally become a memetic device, infiltrating permaculture at the language level, something my actual physical body is obviously unsuitable for. Many years ago I now was just a young chaos

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T H E AC C E L E R AT E D N E C RO M A N C E R / THE DEATH CODEX: THE ACCELERATED N E C RO M A N C E R’ S S P E C I A L E D I T I O N E R E B U S S O C I E T Y, 2 0 2 4

magickian with both dyslexia and no formal training as a writer. I knew what I wanted to say, knew that I had to say it to remain sane, but lacked both the skill and the platform to actually do so effectively.

It was a last ditch effort to start moving forward as an author which made me begin looking seriously at Grant Morrison’s self insertion into The Invisibles. As a result the language based version of myself known as Gavin Fox was born. While this initial set of rituals occurred long before I had solidified the structure of Trisphere model, I can definitely look back now and see how they fell within that system. Through sigils, outreach and ritual under that hyperfictional pen name I initially harvested just enough

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attention at the synthetic level to generate the required interest by a handful of smaller publishers, who were willing to look beyond the rawness of my writing at the Systemic, narrative stage long enough to give me a platform. And once I was done the resulting magazines and anthologies entered the kinetic for the audience to enjoy.

Of course, as anyone who has had a few things published over the years while handling their own promotion will attest, if what you create has merit than it is eventually reinserted through the universal mediums of advertising and word or mouth back into the synthetic sphere to start all over again. I never planned for that of course, though it came as a welcome surprise. My literary life has been massively changed for the better by the repeated journey though the Trisphere model’s ever turning nodes. The current rotation has me writing for Modern Occultist, something that I would have lacked the confidence to even dream of doing a decade ago. I do not know what lays ahead for me on the next go around, but it will be fun finding out.

MO Yo u m a ke a g e n u i n e l y p ro vo c a t i ve c l a i m at the heart of the article: that the audience is the real engine of memetic manifestation—that it’s the attention of others, invested, disinterested, oblivious, and dreaming alike, that feeds the meme until it’s ready to be fired. This puts the chaos magician in a fundamentally different relationship to their working than traditional solitary practice—you’re not the only power source in the room. How did you first arrive at that insight, and does it change the ethical calculus of the working?

GF It was a happy accident actually. I used to share a few of my sigils online back in the early days of social media, mostly hidden in art pieces or short form fiction, and noticed a weird quirk whereby the results would seemingly manifest easier if others had engaged with them before I fired and forgot the

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glyph. Not every time of course. There are no silver bullets as far as magick goes. But when the desire did generate the road to manifestation was generally smoother, more directly tied to the original narrative in some way, and that got me thinking.

Around this time I was also engaging with the failed Technopagan current, mostly though old forum posts and surviving personal websites. While a lot of that discourse seems to have been rooted in cyber-utopianism, their less well discussed assertion that the online space could be manipulated like a second astral plane to generate magickal results intrigued me. After playing with the concept of harvesting attention for a while, both in the real world and online, I was shocked to find that there was suddenly a lot of talk out of nowhere about the role that the magickally charged memes of others may have played in certain highly contentious political events.

The resulting backlash against chaos magick was visceral, and largely unfounded. But I dug around for answers, reverse engineered some of the techniques that were being vilified in the media, ignored the negativity and instead treated them like any other magickal system worthy of deconstruction. And from all these seemingly unrelated strands my Trisphere model finally emerged.

As far as ethical considerations go, there is little danger in the act of siphoning off a bite of attention here and there in the way I have formulated.

This becomes doubly true if those being shown it were going to engage with the memetic payload anyway, even just in passing on their social media home feed. All I am doing is putting that idle mind to use. This is a line that some will refuse to cross of course, and I can respect that position on viewer sovereignty. But I see little difference between my public payloads and what the average advertising agency produces, except perhaps that I am more honest about what I want from the equation than they are. Culture is a long con, nothing more, nothing less,

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and it is better to be on the winning side of the table.

MO The Grant Morrison and Alan Moore examples are the two most famous hypersigil cases in the tradition— Morrison writing himself into The Invisibles and living the consequences, Moore’s Constantine tipping him a smile o n t h e s t re e t . Yo u u s e b o t h to i l l u s t r a te Systemic Sphere operations, but then immediately note that the bar for entry at that level is one “few can scramble over.” The sigilbomb is your democratized alternative—Chaos Magic’s answer to the hypersigil for practitioners without a publishing deal or a global readership. How conscious was that parallel when you designed the sigilbomb format, and do you think it scales? Is there a version of this that works at Morrison-level reach?

GF Well I would say that the parallel was not only a consideration when designing those events, but a driving force. I structured the format for the sigil bomb to democratize the strange as much as possible, stripping down the tools that brought others success and offering them to those who would never have a large enough platform of their own to make the system work. I have a deep seated respect for Morison in particular. His DisinfoCon speech was one of my earliest magickal inspirations, while The Invisibles is groundbreaking even outside of the more mystical connotations it obviously holds. He worked and indeed bled for the audience which would later go on to empower such remarkable change within his hypersigilised mundane life. Such is the myth that surrounds his career, anyway.

The Projekt sigilbombs are a natural offshoot of the Trisphere model, group ritual done by individuals, each magickian freely using the attention of the other participants as a resource to solidify desire. The only real difference to a regular harvesting operation is that the majority of those there are not only e mass firing undertaken by every

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MO Yo u d e s c r i b e > _ ” P ro j e k t ” . . — t h e egregore that emerged from your sigilbombs—with a kind of fond, slightly awed detachment: “my distillation of that decentralized and indeed cyberutopian memetic essence,” still out there in the online stacks, quietly humming. That’s a significant thing to have created: an autonomous entity born from collective magical attention, now running independently of its originator. What is your actual relationship with >_”Projekt”.. at this point? Do you work with it actively, or has it genuinely become something that operates beyond your direction?

GF >_”Projekt”.. is an anomaly for sure. I never set out to create an egregore in the first place, and really just had to find somewhere to put all the residual energy from the sigilbomb that has just finished a few hours before. That year I was working on barcode based glyphs, and when the seven I had generated were laid out side by side at the end of

“Magick for me is cut and paste.

Collage. Bricolage. Patchwork synthesis. Stripping the core correlations out of a hundred different spell books and stapling them back together as a battering ram to bust open the doors to the treasure vault of abundance so I can grab something shiny.”

the event they seemed to contain a definite grinning skull motif. The rest, as they say, is history.

Of course I could have twisted it into something self serving. Perhaps others would have in my place, arguing that the left over hum in the air was payment for keeping the ship on course over the week and to be used as they saw fit. But the energy that had been raised leading up to its creation was not mine to keep.

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So I birthed something in the spirit of early freeware, and released it into the stacks. I still call upon >_”Projekt”.. by name before starting the sigilbombs I run even now, though it is far from a personal relationship. My creation is away on a diplomatic mission of sorts, smoothing the path for open access digital occult rituals, and rarely comes back to share a cup of coffee with its creator. But I can feel it doing what it does, and encourage anyone else who has similar events at the planning stage to call upon its aid too.

MO In your personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students and initiates— how would you describe “Occult Philosophy”?

GF I think I may have a slightly controversial take on that to be honest.

Magick for me is cut and paste. Collage.

Bricolage. Patchwork synthesis.

Stripping the core correlations out of a hundred different spell books and stapling them back together as a battering ram to bust open the doors to the treasure vault of abundance so I can grab something shiny. I find the hidden philosophical aspects are the least interesting, outside of my enduring love of folklore of course. Considering that one of my favorite riffs on the Lesser Banishing Ritual replaces all of the named angels with 1980’s Decepticons, and still works to align consciousness while calming the energy in the room, my pop culture mysticism has pedigree.

Each to their own though. Last thing I would want to do is disrespect the choices of others, or make myself out to have the only true path to enlightenment or some such nonsense.

Many find happiness in the myths and poetry of a bygone age. Comfort in hierarchical grades and robed fraternal orders. I do not, but that is no reason to exclude others from enjoying being a part of something bigger than themselves. It was just never for me is all.

a whole circle of salt. The stories have allegorical power. They are morality plays, ways of sharing hidden insights, perhaps even rituals in their own right.

But the magick itself is rarely that complicated once you get a feel for the strings that need to be pulled to make the puppets dance.

MO What was your personal start on your own journey on this path?

GF That is a tough one to be honest. I think I was always going to become an occultist of some kind, the only question was what port in the storm I would sail to when the spooky hit the fan, which it seemed to have a habit of doing alarmingly regularly while I was growing up. I had this knack for getting into strange situations, poking around in places I was not supposed to be.

Pushing for the truth while having no life experience to help me see what that even was. Making an immature mess. I guess I first brushed up against magick the way many people do, in comic books and cartoons. I was always the weird, grungy kid who looked for secret tunnels under the school, swapped tales of haunted houses with classmates, climbed through the windows of derelict churches to see what hid between the rotting pews. Bodies sometimes, though that is another story entirely...

As for the new initiates, I would advise only that they take the taller tales that seem to infest the magickal space with

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PUTTING CHAOS IN CHAOS An Exclusive Look at THE CHAOS APPLE

e g r o F r e p m Thu Of all the occult topics floating about out there, Chaos is probably the most misunderstood. At the same time, it’s one of the easiest to comprehend. Accepting Chaos for what it is versus falling back on preconceived notions might be a challenge, but once you do accept it, a whole new realm of possibility will open for you. Literally.

Chaos Condensed

Let’s start with a quotation from the Principia Discordia: “Magicians, and [their] progeny the scientists, have always taken them- selves and their subject in an orderly and sober manner, thereby disregarding an essential metaphysical balance. When Magicians learn to approach philosophy as a malleable art instead of an immutable Truth, and learn to appreciate the absurdity of man’s endeavors, then they will be able to pursue their art with a lighter heart, and perhaps gain a clearer understanding of it, and therefore gain more effective magic. CHAOS IS ENERGY.”[i] [i] Hill and Thornley, Principia Discordia, 00061.

Putting the Chaos in Chaos

I mentioned in chapter 1 that Austin Osman Spare referred to the shared consciousness of the universe as Kia, and I will add here that Peter J. Carroll described Kia as life force, in which Chaos is concentrated to spark human consciousness. Carroll also theorized that between Chaos and the physical world, and between Kia and waking thought, there is a sort of non-substance called Aether, which is basically all the possibilities that Chaos has generated, but which have not yet (and may or may not ever) come to fruition.[ii] By working within this unfamiliar but accommodating par- adigm, focusing thoughts on specific desires or statements of intent, and manipulating matter in certain ways—say, lighting candles, burning incense, or drawing sigils—bits of Aether can be coerced into solidification, which in turn can result in controlled coincidences. This is the basis of Chaos Magic.

From The Chaos Apple by Thumper Forge. © 2025 by Thumper Fo r g e. U s e d by p e r m i s s i o n f r o m L l ewe l l y n Wo r l d w i d e, Lt d . , w w w. L l e w e l l y n . c o m .

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To put it all in Discordian terms: Out of Chaos come Eris and Aneris, and out of Eris come the five Elements (Aether). By practicing Witchcraft, and by Ordering and Disordering things in innovative ways, the intangible concepts of Boom, Pungent, Sweet, Prickle, and Orange can have concrete, substantial effects. [ii] Carroll, Liber Null & Psychonaut, 28–29.

Crafting With Chaos Rolling for Ism

I honestly do not remember where I first came across the following apparatus, although I want to say Peter J. Carroll originally developed it, so I’m just going to attribute it to him. Regardless, as a method for gaining practical experience in moving back and forth between different belief systems, it cannot be beat.

Obtain a six-sided die, and assign a different theism to each number, like so: 1. Atheism 2. Duotheism 3. Henotheism 4. Monotheism 5. Pantheism 6. Polytheism Role the die and look at the number. Whatever the- ism comes up is your new religious belief system.

For instance, in trying this technique out for myself, I rolled my die and got the number four: monotheism. My goal, then, was to restructure my current beliefs into a monotheistic worldview, like so: Discordianism is a monotheistic religion based entirely on the worship of Eris, the goddess of discord. We have myths that come out of ancient Greek religion that talk about Eris interacting with other gods and goddesses, but those are just stories used to teach, and to give us a better understanding of Eris herself. There are tales of Eris in conflict with other goddesses, but again, these are just stories. Eris is both Creation and Destruction: We have no need of any other goddesses, since Eris is more than capable of handling both. And while it would be easy to say, “Oh, other goddesses are just aspects of Eris … ” No. There aren’t any other goddesses. There really is just Eris. And this is what I fully believed for twenty-four hours.

Role your die every morning for five days, and every day, rework your core beliefs to fit your new theism. You may discover that some theisms are more comfortable than others, or you may be surprised to learn that your beliefs adapt well to all of them. Either way, you will find it easier and easier to shift your beliefs around as needed, which is a huge step toward using those beliefs as magical tools.

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with

Thumper Forge

when the actors take their roles seriously. And different actors might interpret a given character in a variety of ways, which means there isn’t one “correct” way to play the part. What’s much more important is the ability to give an authentic and believable performance.

M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T The Chaos Apple opens with a scene that, to me, perfectly encapsulates the spirit of the whole book: you're lying naked on a massage table in LED goggles while your friend Chester performs biofield tuning, and when you ask what you're doing, he says simply, “Chaos Magic.” It's a wonderfully disarming entry point! But what strikes us at Modern Occultist is how seriously you take Chaos Witchcraft beneath all the irreverence. For readers who might falsely mistake assume from the playfulness (ie., the “Pringles can curse”!), what would you say is the genuine intellectual and spiritual thesis of the book?

THUMPER FORGE I really want readers to understand that there is no right or wrong when it comes to magical practice and belief: There’s only what works for the individual. I tend to think about it in terms of theatre – like, a comedy can only be successful

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MO To me, one of the most precise and useful distinctions in the book is your differentiation between “Eclectic Witchcraft” and “Chaos Witchcraft”: in Eclectic practice, you write, “practices are assembled around belief,” whereas in Chaos Witchcraft, “beliefs are assembled around practice.” That's an elegant formulation that cuts to something real, especially in our magazine’s own stance. Can you walk us through what that distinction looks like in actual day-to-day practice?

TF In day-to-day practice, it’s basically just determining what goal I’m trying to accomplish, figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to accomplish it, and then adjusting my perspective to best align with the goal. For instance, I got interested in lithomancy at a time when I did not have any stones or crystals lying around the house. I didn’t feel like waiting until I could afford a trip to the local metaphysical shop, so I changed my personal understanding of what a “stone” actually is: Instead of defining it as a polished piece of mineral, I decided that a stone was any small object that could represent either one of the seven classical planets, or

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an area of personal concern (home, life, love, luck, or news). It wasn’t hard at all to accept this definition, so once it was in place, I dug out some old marbles and started reading with them.

I eventually got hold of some legitimate stones to use for lithomantic divination, but I still read with the marbles for fun.

MO Discordianism (the modern worship of Eris, goddess of discord) is central to the architecture of The Chaos Apple, and you trace its origins from that legendary night in a bowling alley where Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley encountered a talking chimpanzee with a scroll. What fascinates us is your observation that Mal-2 himself didn't originally believe in Eris, but came to describe her as “an authentic goddess” and “an old one” through the sheer ex p e r i e n c e o f w o r k i n g w i t h h e r . Yo u ' ve been a closet Discordian for close to two decades … What is your own relationship with Eris—and what does it mean, practically speaking, to work with a deity whose sacred text explicitly instructs you not to believe what you read?

TF I tend to refer to myself as a Discordian warlock, because I’ve literally signed contracts (both for The Chaos Apple and upcoming projects) at the behest of Eris, and our relationship remains pretty quid pro quo: I talk about her a lot, and in return, she keeps my life just weird enough to be manageably entertaining. Whenever I have to deal with an unexpected inconvenience, someone inevitably says, “Well, that’s what you get for working with Eris.” The thing is, Eris isn’t the one throwing obstacles in my path or sending the nasties from Pandora’s box to rough me up or whatever. Instead, she’s the one who hides solutions in unexpected places and bizarre series of events.

Recently, I couldn’t get my car key out of the ignition, so I called an auto locksmith. The very polite receptionist who answered their phone asked me if the car was in park, at which point I realized that it was actually in neutral.

So I went ahead and put it in park, and the key slid right out.

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Eris did not get the key stuck, nor did she compel me to accidentally leave the car in the wrong gear. But when I told the receptionist that the key was free, she abandoned her inside voice and screamed, “I AM A GENIUS,” and that was 100% Eris.

“The one thing I want newcomers to understand is also the one misconception I want them to leave behind: Nothing bad will happen to you when you start to practice magic”

MO The concept of belief as a tool (“paradigm shifting”)—is the defining hallmark of Chaos Magic, and you explore it with real depth throughout the book. But you're careful to distinguish between casually saying “I can believe whatever I want” and the disciplined, intentional practice of adopting and discarding belief systems to unlock magical results. (The example of converting to Christianity for the duration of a folk magic working and then returning to Paganism is striking.)

How do you actually know, as a practitioner, when a paradigm shift is genuinely working versus when you're just performing one? And is there a paradigm you've shifted into that genuinely surprised you?

TF The one paradigm shift that really caught me off guard involved Catholic saints and Greek gods. I’ve always been fascinated with saints whose patronages and iconographies seem to trace back to pre-Christian worship, and I had this idea that if I prayed to one of those saints, the deity from whom they evolved would answer. I was not raised Catholic, nor did I have any real experience with Hellenic polytheism, but I ended up petitioning St. Barbara to watch over a friend in the military, around ever since.

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MO Yo u ' re a n i n i t i a te o f b o t h t h e Gardnerian tradition and the Minoan Brotherhood—both deeply initiatory, structured, lineage-based systems—and yet here you are writing a book about a magical approach that prizes avoidance of dogma above almost everything else.

Yo u a c k n o w l e d g e t h i s w i t h h u m o r throughout the book (and, yes, there were times I laughed out from your pointed observations), including a wonderful moment where you describe Zarathud, the Apostle of Bureaucracy, as “the personification of ceremonial magic, because if there's anything out there that epitomizes bureaucracy, it's ceremonial magic.” How do you personally hold the tension between traditional initiatory practice and the radical experimentalism of Chaos Witchcraft? Do they inform each other, or do they live in separate rooms? (This may be especially fascinating to the ceremonial magicians who read Modern Occultist…)

TF I feel like it’s less that they live in separate rooms, and more that they live in separate areas of a loft apartment.

Initiatory traditions are based on frameworks – for example, there’s a proscribed method of setting up a ritual circle – but within that framework, there’s plenty of space for experimentation, to see what new concepts or techniques might work well within the context of the tradition. On the other hand, it’s easy to go through the motions of a ceremonial practice, and do everything just because “that’s how it’s always been done.” This is where the “what if” aspect of Chaos Magic comes in handy. What if I ran a ritual without casting a circle? What if I used kitchen gadgets as ritual weapons? Being willing to move away from the “because the book says so” mindset and get a little irreverent is a good way to learn which parts of ritual practice are crucial to the success of a given working, and which parts are just bells and whistles.

MO Yo u d e s c r i b e yo u r o w n m a g i c a l background as rooted firmly in initiatory Wicca before your fateful

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biofield tuning session introduced you to Chaos Magic. But the book gives the impression of someone who was always, in some sense, a Chaos Witch—you just needed someone to point it out. Was there a moment earlier in your practice, even before Chester and the LED goggles, where you intuited that the strict recipe-following approach to magic wasn't quite capturing everything? What first cracked the door —or, rather, lifted the veil—for you?

TF My early practice wasn’t really fueled by devotion or reverence for nature or anything as much as it was by just wanting to see what would happen. I remember pouring a cup of water off a balcony to see if that would bring rain, and doodling sigils on my hands to see if I could influence the behavior of anyone I happened to touch. I don’t recall ever being particularly discouraged when a spell didn’t work, or didn’t work the way I wanted it to – instead, it was more like, “Okay, so what will work?” In a way, the spells that failed to launch were more incentivizing than the ones that got spectacular results (like pouring water off a balcony).

MO What is one practice or activity you recommend to all practicing occultists— whether they're just beginning their journey or are experienced practitioners looking to expand their daily system?

(It doesn't have to be Chaos-specific; we love a good universal recommendation!)

TF Not to get all back-in-my-day, but I never see anyone on social media discussing grounding and centering, which was… well, back in my day, always the starting point for magical practice.

Today, the focus seems to be more on protection than anything else. And don’t get me wrong: protective magic is important. But being able to recognize yourself, both within your own body and within your greater environment, is not a skill that should be slept on.

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MO What is one book—magic-influenced or otherwise—that you'd recommend all occultists read as part of their path?

TF Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. I read that book way back in the midnineties as I was just starting to explore Paganism and witchcraft, and its animistic themes had a profound effect on my (at the time) nebulous religious beliefs. It also changed the way I thought about tools and symbols: One of the main characters in the book is a sacred conch shell, and her journey in particular caused me to realize that any ritual implement or representation of the divine I might need could be found in the world around me.

I’m also going to add Bell Book and Murder by Rosemary Edghill as a close second. It’s a detective novel set in the N e w Yo r k P a g a n c o m m u n i t y o f t h e l a te 80s and early 90s, with characters based on key real-world figures. It’s basically a literary time capsule with an engaging plot and a whole lot of sarcasm.

MO In your own philosophy, what does being an "occultist" mean to you in today's world—and do you think the line between practitioner and scholar is one worth maintaining?

TF For me, being an occultist means maintaining a healthy balance between practice and scholarship. I can’t personally imagine calling myself a witch if I were only reading about witchcraft and not actually doing it. But at the same time, the most grievous misinformation floating around out there regarding witchcraft and Paganism is spread by people who don’t have any workable knowledge of the history of the modern witchcraft revival.

I’m always going to emphasize practice over book-learnin’, but it’s also crucial that we’re aware enough of our history not to repeat all the mistakes our forebearers made.

to newcomers—you meet the reader where they are, whether that's someone who discovered Chaos Witchcraft through WandaVision or someone already deep in Peter J.Carroll. For someone who's never worked with Chaos Magic, but is curious, what's the single most important thing to understand before beginning—and what's the one misconception you most want them to leave behind?

TF The one thing I want newcomers to understand is also the one misconception I want them to leave behind: Nothing bad will happen to you when you start to practice magic.

Online occult spaces can very quickly devolve into hotbeds of fear-mongering, especially when the subject of Chaos Magic comes up. But the Chaos in Chaos Magic is not random carnage and pandemonium – it’s just the potential to bring about change. So a spell is not going to backfire if you don’t follow the instructions correctly; the gods are not going to rain brimstone and heartbreak down upon you if you forget an offering; and the universe is not going to punish you for doing things the way you want to do them.

But it’s also important to understand that nothing at all will happen if you don’t take those first steps and actually practice. It will take some effort to start getting consistent results, but if it was easy from the get-go, it wouldn’t be witchcraft.

MO The Chaos Apple is explicitly accessible

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with Eric

Wagner M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T An Insider’s Guide to Robert Anton Wilson is as almost as much a memoir of a twenty-two-year correspondence and friendship with RAW himself as it is a critical guide to his work—you describe Wilson making you a hand-drawn Joycean map of Dublin, writing you letters about Finnegans Wake, encouraging your poetry newsletter.

In your experience, how did Wilson’s famous “maybe logic”—his radical epistemic humility—actually manifest in his personal relationships? Was he as genuinely uncertain in private as he was in print, or was the philosophical stance partly a performance? (I’ll give a personal opinion here: I think he was the real deal, but authors do often have a persona…)

ERIC WAGNER Bob seemed to me the real deal. He had internalized not coming to premature certainty in general. Please note that I did not spend that much time with him in person. We met a few times from 1987 through 2000. We mostly communicated via snail mail and email with a few phone calls.

MO The Insider’s Guide is structured in a distinctly “Wilsonian way”—Joycean associations, kabbalistic numerology, the Law of Fives bleeding into the very architecture of the book itself, etc. At what point did you realize you couldn’t write about Wilson’s method without also writing through it? And did that realization feel like a trap, a gift, or both?

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A N I N S I D E R’ S G U I D E T O RO B E RT A N T O N W I L S O N & STRAIGHT OUTTA DUBLIN NEW FALCON, 2004 & HILARITAS PRESS, 2025

EW I had written a fair amount about Wilson before I wrote my first book, and I had experimented a lot using methods inspired by Wilson, Pound, Joyce, and Crowley, etc. It felt like a gift, but my Crowley work did seem like a trap.

Crowleyean Kabbalah can reimprint the third circuit of the nervous system, but afterwards it seems hard to get out of that Crowleyean way of looking at the world. Like the zen student who meditated on an ox, my horns won’t fit through the door. I have deliberately avoided Crowley for the most part over the past 21 years, but I have not successfully replaced that third circuit imprint.

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MO Yo u d o c u m e n t W i l s o n ’ s l i f e l o n g devotion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos—the phrase “hilaritas et amor” from the Paradiso section even became Wilson’s e m a i l s i g n a t u re . Ye t P o u n d i s a d e e p l y problematic figure—which both you and Wilson acknowledged. How did Wilson square that particular tension, and how do you square it as someone who has spent decades in both men’s work?

EW Bob did a very good job of separating t h e d a n c e r f ro m t h e d a n c e , a s Ye a t s p u t it. He would learn from people despite their more problematical aspects, as one can see from his discussions of Pound and Crowley, etc. I started reading Pound in 1982, and I would to read a bunch of Pound, become disgusted, and leave him alone for a while. Then I would read a bit of Pound, go “Wow!”, learn a lot, read a bunch more by and about Pound, get disgusted, and leave him alone for a while. As with Crowley, Pound has influenced me very profoundly, more so than with Crowley. I have also had the good fortune to teach number of Pound’s books in high school and community college classes. In the 1990’s Bob invited me to participate in a discussion of Pound online at the Zero City Amphitheater. In our discussions there Bob compared me to St. Paul because he found me too judgmental of Uncle Ezra.

MO The Insider’s Guide was published in 2004 and revised in 2011, and then revised again in 2020, and Wilson himself passed away in 2007. Now, nearly two decades later, Hilaritas Press is carrying his legacy forward and his readership feels genuinely resurgent. Do you think Wilson anticipated the particular way the 21st century would make his ideas feel prophetic—the weaponization of conspiracy, the collapse of consensus reality, the rise of reality tunnels as a mass cultural condition—or would even he have been surprised by how darkly his playful epistemology has been confirmed?

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EW The 2011 second edition did not contain any major revisions. In answer to your questions, it beats me. I suspect he would accept that some of his ideas do seem prophetic. I know Trump and the pandemic deeply surprised me. I remember wondering in 2009 what Bob would have thought of President Obama.

In the early nineties Bob liked President Clinton, but he became disillusioned as the decade continued. As 2007 recedes into the past, I feel less and less certainty that I could predict Bob’s responses to our current situation.

MO Wilson wrote the introduction to your b o o k i n o n e s e n te n c e — “ Yo u j u s t re a d it!”—a joke that is also a genuine philosophical statement about the relationship between commentary and primary text. (I really loved that!) What did he make of being the subject of such sustained, loving exegesis? Did he ever push back, correct you, or say “you’ve got that completely wrong”?

And if so—what?

“Crowleyean Kabbalah can reimprint the third circuit of the nervous system, but afterwards it seems hard to get out of that Crowleyean way of looking at the world. Like the zen student who meditated on an ox, my horns won’t fit through the door.”

EW I have heard that he liked my book and felt grateful for my efforts. He would push back (as with my judgements about Ezra Pound). In 1988 or so I asked him if the main action of Illuminatus! took place in 1976. He said no. A decade later I asked him what year that main action took place in, and he answered “1976.” Of course, by then I had begun working on my book, and he genuinely

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wanted to help with that. I had asked what he thought about me writing the book, and told me to do it and that he wanted to help. His introduction as “Mordecai the Foul” gives some of his corrections of my errors.

MO In your personal opinion—and to the benefit of new students and initiates— how would you describe “Occult Philosophy”?

EW I tend to think that occult means hidden, so I think of hidden philosophy, ways of thinking that can get one in trouble with the authorities.

MO What was your personal start on your own journey on this path (or chosen profession)?

EW As a child I had an 8:00 bedtime, 8:30 if I read. That brainwashed me into becoming a constant reader. At five I loved the cartoon Eighth Man where the android used the name Tobor (robot backwards). A few years later I watched Son of Dracula where Lon Chaney Jr.’s character uses the name Alucard. This prepared me for Joyce, Wilson, and Crowley’s word games. Plus reading Phil Farmer and Philip K. Dick as teen prepared me for reading Dr. Wilson.

would recommend to a new student or occult practitioner (or historian / academic)?

EW I love Rafi Zabor’s books, and he and I have become friends. I started reading his writing on jazz in Musician magazine in 1979, and I highly recommend his books.

MO And finally, what is one daily activity that you believe is a MUST for all seekers of the occult philosophies and/or arts?

EW I don’t know. I do Duolingo every day. I think anyone interested the Kabbalah might enjoy using Duolingo to learn the Hebrew alphabet (unless they already know it). I do Ibn ‘Arabi’s Prayers for the Week, translated by Hirtenstein and Beneito, every day, and I highly recommend them.

MO To this magazine, the concept of “modern occultism” can (and should) be equally viewed from both the academic and practical sides. What would you recommend to a person only now coming along to these subjects, and is uncertain if an objective academic career, or a true “practical path” may be right for them?

EW Beats me. If you can get good degrees and get paid for some publications, that seems a great blessing.

MO What is one book, film, lecture, or teacher that helped shape your journey and personal philosophies that you

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THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW

with

Tom Jackson

E V E RY D AY I S A G O O D D AY : RO B E R T S H E A O N I L LU M I NAT U S ! W R I T I N G A N D A NA RC H I S M ( E D . )

Robert Anton Wilson went on to fairly quickly publish a series of other brilliant books that continued some of the same themes as Illuminatus!, e.g.

Cosmic Trigger in 1977, the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy (1979-1981), The Illuminati Papers (1980) and so on, with more new books coming out in the 1980s. Robert Shea's first novel, Time of the Dragons (the first of the two Shike novels), came out in June 1981. six years after Illuminatus!, and the connections to Illuminatus! are more subtle than in Wilson's work.

HILARITAS PRESS, 2025

M O D E R N O C C U LT I S T John Higgs observed that one of the great paradoxes of Illuminatus! is that its cult following transferred itself almost entirely to Robert AntonWilson, leaving Roberts Shea’s enormous contributions and later solo work at g e n u i n e r i s k o f b e i n g f o rg o t te n . Yo u spent a decade assembling this collection to correct that imbalance.

What do you think produced that asymmetry in the first place—and what does Shea’s work offer that Wilson’s, for all its brilliance, doesn’t? And also, is that something that you can directly address as the editor and chief webmaster for the RAWIllumination.net official blog?

TOM JACKSON I suspect that part of it is that after Illuminatus! was published in 1975,

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Shea's solo novels are all historical novels, many of them set in the Middle Ages, and will appeal to anyone who likes a good story and wants a vivid sense of what life might have been like in those days. When I began my RAWIllumination.net blog back in 2010, it was almost exclusively devoted to Robert Anton Wilson and to RAW's many interests. As I read more of Shea's novels, though, I began to realize he was a very interesting writer in his own right, and I gradually shifted to more posts about Shea. I know have both "Robert Anton Wilson Resources" and "Robert Shea Resources" areas on my home page.

MO Shea’s spiritual path was a fascinatingly personal amalgam— leaving Catholicism at thirty, absorbing Zen through Alan Watts and Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing,

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and weaving Cathar mysticism, Sufi philosophy, and samurai warrior traditions through his historical novels.

On the other hand, RAW’s occultism was explicit, documented, and publicly performed, while Shea’s seems quieter, more interior, and practiced rather than proclaimed. In your decade of research, what did you come to understand about how Shea’s spiritual life actually functioned—and how it shaped the books?

TJ By his own account, and according to his son, Mike Shea, Robert Shea meditated for about 20 minutes a day.

As you note, he was really into Zen Buddhism. He came across an article by Ray Bradbury in Writer magazine, "Zen and the Art of Writing," and it made a deep impression on him. In a 1985 newspaper article that I recently reprinted on my blog, Shea said, "In his article, Bradbury implied that there was something about Zen that, if studied, could help people become more creative writers. So, like a lot of people, I got involved in mysticism thinking it would give me some practical benefit. But once you get into it, you lose that motivation. Writing becomes a way of getting closer to mysticism."

MO The title No Governor—Shea’s anarchist zine—comes from the Zhuangzi line that Wilson also loved: “There is no governor anywhere.” It’s a phrase that sits at the intersection of Taoist philosophy, political anarchism, and something approaching genuine magical thinking—the idea that the universe has no central authority and therefore neither should human society. How do you understand the relationship between Shea’s Zen practice and his anarchism? Were they the same conviction in different registers, or genuinely separate commitments that happened to coexist?

TJ I'm not sure I see a connection, except in the sense that Zen and Shea's anarchism both reflect his commitment to individualism. The practice of zazen meditation and the study of Zen seems like a form of inner development, while

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Shea's anarchist activity, participation on antiwar marches, and so on, reflect his activism out in the world.

MO To many readers, the Illuminatus!

Trilogy would never have been published without Shea’s pragmatism— it was his relationship with editor Bob Abel that secured the contract, and his “easygoing” temperament that kept the collaboration alive while Wilson fought the publishers. As someone who runs RAWIllumination.net and has spent years immersed in both men’s worlds, how do you personally square your obvious love of Wilson with what feels, frankly, like a historical injustice to his co-author?

TJ Well, part of the reason I got Hilaritas Press to publish my anthology of Robert Shea's shorter pieces, Every Day Is a GOOD Day, in 2025 was that I wanted to draw attention to Shea and argue that perhaps he has been overshadowed a bit too much by his Illuminatus! co-author.

Having said that, when you compare the two solo careers, in some ways Shea was more successful than Wilson. Shea's first fiction work, Shike, originally published as separate novels and then in a one-volume set, sold very well and made Shea quite a bit of money. His followup novels did not do as well, which bothered Shea, but his literary agent, Al Zuckerman, was very much into helping his writers be commercially successful, and if Shea had lived longer (he died of cancer at age 61 in 1994, while still very active as a writer), perhaps Zuckerman could have helped him produce another big hit.

(Zuckerman's "how-to" book, Writing the Blockbuster Novel, was dedicated to five of the writers Zuckerman represented, including Shea, and says that all five wrote "blockbuster" novels that did not get the recognition they deserved. Wilson's major solo work of fiction after Illuminatus! was his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. I love those books and they have a strong following among RAW fans, but they did not sell particularly well. When I interviewed David Hartwell, a famous science fiction book editor who put out several of

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Wilson's books, Hartwell told me the Cat novels had decent sales, but added that they did not do well enough to interest Hartwell in putting out sequels to the books. I also don't have the impression that Wilson's "Historical Illuminatus" books did particularly well, either. Wilson wrote three, then stopped. He had originally planned to write five novels.

MO Wilson’s relationship to magic and the occult was always epistemically playful —maybe it’s real, maybe it’s a useful map, maybe the map is the territory; Shea’s novels and essays, however, suggest a man who took the mystical traditions he wrote about with genuine seriousness—the Cathars, the Sufis, the Zinja warrior monks—not as exotic scenery but as living systems of meaning. Did your research for Every Day is a Good Day reveal anything about Shea’s private occult or magical beliefs that surprised you—something the novels hint at but the public record doesn’t confirm?

TJ Shea was open minded about occult lore, but one of the things I noticed when I was assembling the book was that he took time to make it clear that he did not regard himself as an occult practitioner. He was a Discordian, he was very much a student of Zen Buddhism, but in an interview for Outworlds magazine, he said: "I've pretty much ceased to believe in the supernatural and so am not into NeoPaganism or the occult. I am very interested in Zen Buddhism. That isn't very fashionable any more, but I think most of the Americans who took up Zen in the 50s and 60s barely scratched the surface. Zen, as I understand it, doesn't involve any belief in the supernatural.

It's more like a kind of psychotherapy."

experience for me and one that has greatly enriched my life."

MO What was your personal start on your own journey on this path (or chosen profession)?

TJ I first read Illuminatus! in the 1970s, when I was a college student in Oklahoma. I came to regard myself as a libertarian, politically, and my friends who were fans of the books also were libertarians. I thought of Illuminatus! as a "libertarian" novel. The occult aspects of the book did not particularly impress themselves upon me. It was only after I had done my blog for awhile that it really registered with me that many, if not most, RAW fans were not in fact libertarians and that in fact for perhaps the majority, RAW's interest in magick was the most interesting thing about him.

RAW had a lot of interests and I think many of his fans are like me -- they focus on what particularly interests them. So I am particularly interested, for example, in libertarianism, in classical music and in literary theory, all topics that RAW wrote a lot about. I have only recently been reading more about the occult. Lately, I have been reading The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic by Alan Moore and Steve Moore, and I have found it particularly useful to learn about the occult and the role it plays in Wilson's work. For example, the book has an article on the Kabbalah, which Wilson used in the structure of Illuminatus!

A moment later, he adds, "Mysticism as practiced in Zen seems to me to offer the benefits of a religion without the drawbacks. So, I have been meditating every day for the past two years—the zazen method of meditation—counting exhalations up to ten and then starting over again. This has been a profound

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CCULT

READS

history, an instruction waiting to be fulfilled. Maevius Lynn's The Holy Year of Thelema is the first book to address this lacuna comprehensively, and its arrival at this particular cultural moment—when interest in Thelema among practitioners outside the formal initiatory orders has never been higher —feels exactly right. It is a book that has been needed for a long time, and it delivers.

T h e H o l y Ye a r o f T h e l e m a : A Guide to the Ritual Calendar of Aleister Crowley's Tradition

By Maevius Lynn • Llewellyn • 2026 The Thelemic calendar has been hiding in plain sight for over a century. The Book of the Law—the foundational text of Aleister Crowley's tradition, received in Cairo in April 1904— contains explicit instructions for a cycle of holy days: the Equinox of the Gods, the Three Days of the Writing of the Book of the Law, the Summer Solstice, the First Night of the Prophet and His Bride, the Autumnal Equinox, and the Winter Solstice. Every performance of the Gnostic Mass includes a recitation of these occasions by the Deacon, calling the congregation to rise and take notice.

And yet, as the foreword to The Holy Ye a r o f Th e l e m a n o te s w i t h characteristic precision, “these sacred times often come and go with little fanfare.” Crowley left no specific rituals for most of them. The calendar has been, for most of Thelema's

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The book opens with three chapters of foundation-laying that will be more or less useful depending on where the reader is starting from. The biographical sketch of Crowley is among the most balanced available in a popular occult publication: honest about both the genuine fascination of the man and the genuine complexity of his legacy, careful not to whitewash the difficult elements while also refusing to let the tabloid mythology substitute for the actual human being.

Lynn's observation that Crowley was 'a promiscuous queer man at a time when it could land you in jail' situates his iconoclasm in its historical context without either celebrating or condemning it, which is precisely the right note. The chapter on New Aeon Basics covers the Thelemic calendar system, aeonic succession, the Thoth Tarot and its relationship to the holy days, the Tree of Life, and the Hebrew alphabet—a considerable amount of material handled with impressive clarity.

That commitment is one of the book's most important and distinctive features. The introduction names it explicitly: the history of Thelema has been published overwhelmingly by

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men, and the women without whom the tradition could not exist—Rose Edith Kelly who brought the Book of the Law into being, Phyllis Seckler who sustained the A A in America and wrote lucid, beautiful poetry, the historic Scarlet Women — have been systematically underrepresented. Lynn does not merely gesture at this problem; she addresses it throughout the book's structure, including Seckler's poetry alongside the Spring Equinox chapter, discussing the role of women in the historical reception of the tradition, and centering the divine feminine in her ritual work.

The book's heart is its seven chapters on the holy days themselves, each following a consistent and highly practical structure: historical and philosophical context, Tarot correspondences for the four equinox and solstice celebrations, personal reflections by Lynn, “Sparks of Inspiration”—practical prompts for individual practice ranging from journaling exercises to altar setups— and a previously unpublished ritual from a modern Thelemic community.

This last element is genuinely unprecedented, and its value is difficult to overstate.

∴ ∴

The Three Days of the Writing of the Book of the Law chapter is exemplary; Lynn's discussion of the Tunis Comment—Crowley's later instruction forbidding study of the Book of the Law—is one of the most thoughtful treatments of this perennial puzzle in the popular literature. The ritual for the Three Days is simultaneously rigorously Thelemic in its cosmological logic and deeply human in its physicality, and this is the book's most vivid demonstration of Lynn's central argument: that the Thelemic holy days, properly understood, are occasions for joy and celebration, not merely scholarly commemoration. “These are most dire” is what the Tunis Comment says. “These shall be celebrated with joy & beauty” is what the Book of the Law says. Lynn chooses the Book of the Law. The Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice chapters are particularly strong, drawing on the Thoth Tarot cards corresponding to Cancer and

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Capricorn respectively and developing their seasonal and philosophical implications with care. The “Cakes of Light” recipe, complete with both standard and gluten-free versions (a brilliant touch!), is a practical contribution that practitioners will actually use.

We are delighted to welcome Maevius Lynn as a contributor to this issue. Her interview and additional work appear elsewhere in these pages.

The Thelemic calendar has waited over a century for this book, and it was worth the wait.

THE CHAOS APPLE: Magic & Discordianism for the Postmodern Witch

By Thumper Forge • Llewellyn • 2025 Thumper Forge is, by their own account, a “Chaos Muppet.” This is the most useful piece of self-description in an occult book published in recent memory—a reference to a 2012 Slate essay by Dahlia Lithwick that sorted the world into “Order” Muppets (Kermit, Bert, Sam the Eagle: people who try to control chaos) ) and “Chaos” Muppets (Cookie Monster, Animal,

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Ernie: people who embrace or create it). The Chaos Apple: Magic & Discordianism for the Postmodern Witch is the best introduction to Chaos Magic and Discordianism currently available for practitioners coming from a witchcraft background. That is a specific claim, and it is worth being precise about it. There are better technical introductions to Chaos Magic in the classical sense (Peter J. Carroll's Liber Null & Psychonaut for the more philosophically rigorous; Phil Hine's Condensed Chaos for the immediately practical). But for the Wiccan, the eclectic witch, the socialmedia pagan who keeps encountering references to Eris and sigils and paradigm shifting and wants to understand what any of it actually means without abandoning their existing practice, Thumper Forge has written the book.

Forge covers an impressive range of material across thirteen chapters and a structural quirk called “Discordian Dance Breaks”—short sidebars that interrupt the main text to deliver exercises, meditations, prayers, and one extremely filthy nun joke in service of invoking the parking goddess Squat; these playful exercises embody the principle they're teaching by interrupting the reader's settled momentum, introducing the unexpected, and demonstrating that the boundary between serious magical instruction and irreverent comedy is precisely as permeable as Discordian theology has always insisted. The first half of the book builds the theoretical and cosmological foundation; Forge's treatment of Discordian theology—the Principia Discordia's cosmogony of Void, Eris, Aneris, and the five Elements of Boom, Pungent, Sweet, Prickle, and Orange—is the most lucid and genuinely useful exposition of this material available outside the Principia itself. The distinction between Chaos Witchcraft and Eclectic Witchcraft is handled with particular care, because it is the distinction most commonly collapsed by people who discover Chaos online.

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The ethics chapter is unusually strong: here, Forge takes the concept of “the Curse of Greyface”—the Discordian term for the imposition of order upon those who don't want it, or the grey, joyless impulse to flatten and control— and develops it into a functional magical ethics that doesn't require supernatural retribution. However, The Chaos Apple is, from first page to last, genuinely funny. This is rarer in occult literature than it should be, and it is not accidental. Forge writes from within the Discordian tradition, which holds that mirth and reverence are not opposites but necessary complements — that you cannot take magic seriously without also being willing to laugh at it.

We are delighted to welcome Thumper Forge as a contributor to this issue of Modern Occultist, and both an excerpt from The Chaos Apple and an author interview appear elsewhere in this issue. Read the book first, then read the interview: you will have better questions. The Chaos Apple is irreverent, rigorously thought-out, and more fun than any magical textbook has the right to be. Eris approves.

Enjoying these reviews from MODERN OCCULTIST’S latest feature, OCCULT READS? Be sure to check out our official daily blog every day for the B R A N D N E W s e c t i o n , “ B O O K O F T H E D AY,” spotlighting a new release and accompanying review of one of our many wonderful affiliates!

Coming this week...

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COMING SEPTEMBER 2026 ... THE FALL EQUINOX

MODERN CCULTIST Angels

‌ S N O DEM

The Fall Equinox issue of Modern Occultist arrives with another incredible lineup of guest contributors, exclusive interviews, and reviews—a brand new gathering of voices of contemporary magical practice, brought together this time under the banner of ANGELS & DEMONS!

Shavonne Readus

Known as V, is the author of Tarot for the Flawed and Fearless: 22 Keys to Master Self-Confidence, the tarot BFF, intuitive mistress of RedLight Readings; she’s a confidence catalyst, an energy alchemist, and an enthusiast for all things tarot. She is a professional reader, teacher, mentor, and author and has presented at divination conferences both in the United States and internationally. As a former speech and language pathologist, Shavonne has a passion for helping others communicate effectively. Taking that passion and infusing tarot to decipher a client’s best approach to expressing their authenticity, authority, and audacity in the world brings joy to her heart.

Julia Sophia

Co-author of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto: The Impact of the Astrological Outer Planets, Julia is an astrologer, tarot card reader, spiritual teacher, writer, and artist. A long-term student of esoteric studies, Julia’s humanistic academic training informs her combined intellectual and intuitive approach to astrology and spirituality. She is the author of Quiet Portal to the Odd, Curious, and Poetic, a Substack on astrology, myth, and contemporary spiritual culture. She has served as director and teacher of astrology and tarot at Sacred 7 Academy, and she reads tarot professionally at cultural, corporate, and private events across the UK.

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