Occulture

by Carl Abrahamsson

  The activities and methods are fine and decidedly well modeled. A nice and functioning structure, on the whole and in the hole. The applications and implementations are being retuned and re-focused, with great success. Diligence, perseverance, the ability to move slowly at a fast pace, self-discipline, honesty, and so forth. The usual suspects and ingredients are present.

  The words affix themselves to the worlds. The worlds filter themselves through the words. The images are parts of the imaginations, the nations of images, all seeking each other out like grounded magnets, polarities, or cruising sybarites of the night. If we stop and look, we can see a pattern. Others can too, and are certainly willing to pay dearly for the privilege. Thank you very much. The pattern is a mind pattern and that pattern is mine. Imagination is the essence of the apprehension of truth that includes possibilities and makes every situation a potential win-win situation. Come to think about it, imagination is the only truth, with dreams a close-sniffing second: a brother in arms in the war against mechanical minds and the slaves of measurement and the slaves of their own uncut umbilical chords of empiricism. Fuck them until they fall asleep. Fuck them until they wake up. That’s the task of the Mega Golem’s cock and balls: to impregnate them with what they fear most: a reflection of themselves and everything they have denied themselves. Thank you very much.

  But, please, let’s not be dogmatic about it. Not polemical. Many of those who have trod in similar shoes before have failed because of the dogmatic, polemical aspects, the needs in themselves to compensate for their own essentially weak egos and neuroses. Much better to set a good example of self-preservation and success—and so much more enjoyable!—than to rant away mechanically until no one cares to listen.

  The Mega Golem’s cock and balls, ever ready, hard, and fertile. The orifices of your own ears have just been penetrated. It felt quite good, right? “Another time, another orifice”—that’s my motto now. Free will. Free love. Responsibility to the responsible and good times all around!

  “Adieu, adieu, parting is such sweet sorrow.” But it’s not a parting per se. It’s only a parting of the veil. It’s a new opening, a new orifice. It’s just a temporary farewell, a little rest before new battles begin and new mind fields are ploughed. We can patch up the fragments now and slow things down, acting fast while appearing totally and irrevocably still. Still, moving. Still, life.

  Not long after this film and spoken-word piece were finished, Cotton Ferox played in Warsaw, Poland. Knowing that this meant an excellent opportunity to go “full throttle” with the butterfly effect via sonic amplification, I decided to give birth to the actual Mega Golem being. Before this I had also extended invitations to artists I knew who are perceptive enough to understand the concept. I told them that if they wanted to, they could contribute a piece of art (any kind) to the Mega Golem. It could be a thought, a sentiment, or a piece of its multi-gender/hermaphroditic body. It could be visible, invisible, or indivisible. And they didn’t even have to tell me about it either.

  With the film being projected on stage, and with Thomas Tibert and Dr. Zaraza creating suggestive soundscapes behind me, I put on my red plastic devil mask and entered the birth pangs by reading the following poem:

  MEGA GOLEM (BIRTH)

  Mega Golem

  Here you are

  Mega Golem

  Bright new star

  Growing stronger

  By the day

  Growing longer

  Here to stay

  Limbs of force

  And fury too

  No remorse

  One love—or two

  Art by art

  Piece by piece

  You are smart

  And still at ease

  Mega Golem

  Do your thing

  Mega Golem

  In the swing

  Of things to come

  The Is to Be

  Feared by some

  Revered by me

  So it is done!

  And indeed it was! I felt elated, excited, aroused, and intensely satisfied. Now it was all beyond my control (such a wonderful feeling!). I had set the creature in motion, charged with my will, and I could now no longer perceive it with my own senses and sensibilities. The Mega Golem was born.

  Some of my artist friends got in touch to learn more. A few let me know that they had indeed created something for the Mega Golem but didn’t want to tell me exactly what. Which was perfectly fine. The project had already turned into a psychic, transdimensional exquisite corpse, and I could feel another contribution was forthcoming from myself. The following Cotton Ferox concert, in Stockholm in May 2014, offered another chance to go beyond the predictable spoken-word experience and instead ejaculate more Golemic seed. As there was now already (at least) a cock and balls, and life, there needed to be a continued breathing process. I put on the devil mask again and indulged in this:

  ART SET FREE (BREATH)

  Heed the letters

  Heed the books

  Heed the money

  Feed the looks

  A web of wonders

  Near and far

  A clearer picture

  Of who we are

  And can become

  The Is to Be

  And will become

  The life in me

  Open up the doors of markets

  Open up the doors of art

  Open up the doors of mind frames

  This is just a humble start

  The trap is dissolved

  And art set free

  For those involved

  Both you and me

  In it goes and out it comes

  Multiplying possibilities

  Disinformation

  Disinterest

  Disintegration

  Disposability

  Dissemination

  Distribution

  Into the world we come

  And it feels good

  So mote it be!

  Suddenly, the Mega Golem not only existed but started breathing regularly, still out there and still seeing all the worlds and dimensions. The next key ingredient of its system should then be the ability to not only live mechanically/predictably but also to appreciate and enhance life by creativity. Next stop: Libido! This was manifested in the spring of 2016, again in Warsaw, and again embraced by the sonorous safety of Cotton Ferox. No devil mask this time, but still in the same spirit:

  UNFOLDING (FOR VANESSA) (LIBIDO)

  Rising up from the dead

  The sleeping, resting, waiting

  Once again in material form

  Temporarily in transit

  Waiting to be delivered yet again

  Welcome the possibilities

  Anointed with witches’ oil

  A sublime transdimensional expression

  Of Love

  Welcome back

  May it unfold in a life-enhancing way for us both

  And for all involved

  One step at a time

  Will fix desire

  It constrains the mobility of desire

  There are no existential safety nets

  When you don’t exist

  Bring it on

  As always

  Unfolding

  Enhancing

  Uniting

  Creating

  In the best possible way

  Occupy both and all positions at once

  Let’s applaud being too privileged

  For what has already been

  Eternal thanks

  For what is

  Eternal thanks

  For what’s yet to come

  Eternal thanks

  Gratitude is sometimes not enough

  But it is a currency that matters

  In the big picture of life

  Being blessed should not be taken for granted

  Or lightly

  Time breaks down barriers

  As we break down the barriers of time

  The wheel continues

&
nbsp; A hypnagogic triumph

  A hypnopompic truth

  A ruse

  Total allusion

  A simile

  An edge that pierces the crust

  It eludes us

  And instills within us all that we need

  To know

  To dare

  To will

  And to be silent

  Shortly after this, an important contribution also appeared from the outside. The talented American occult philosopher and writer Kadmus sent in a poem for my annual occultural journal The Fenris Wolf, which gave the Mega Golem a healthy and steady heartbeat. This vitalized the creation as such, and I reinforced the poem by reading it out aloud on the launch evening for the publication in London in September of 2016.

  A FRAGMENT OF HEART (A CONTRIBUTION TO THE MEGA GOLEM BY KADMUS)

  Something stirs—

  Where once rivers flowed,

  Where the ghosts of trees rest

  Unremembered.

  Something wakens—

  From concrete

  Once mossy banks,

  And blinks.

  It cherishes—

  How the crows used to gossip in the branches

  Just so,

  And the stones of the river winked

  With hidden quartz.

  It shelters—

  The echoes of days without time

  When walks went on forever

  And we watched clouds play tag

  With our backs bruised with grass stains.

  Something smiles—

  Where slim stalks will grow

  And angry voices will rise in joy

  To demand life for the earth

  The voiceful wind

  The wine-dark sea

  The shivering wave

  The silken sky

  Once more.

  Something remembers—

  The songs we will strike

  Like bonfires

  In the fields at the end of history.

  You can hear its voice calling us together

  Hidden in the folds of the breeze

  In the corners of the night

  When no tread paces.

  “Golem?” it asks,

  “Call me Hope.”

  And this is where the Mega Golem now resides in time and space; alive, vital, sexual (to my knowledge, it currently has one penis and two vaginas—oh, lucky creature!), and willful. I have no idea where this will end, and actually suspect it never will. It definitely contains my charges, and possibly others’ too, so it’s preoccupied all right. Should you ever encounter the Mega Golem, be courteous. It may someday contain a part of you too, extended into the realms of magic, fantasy, and dreams—that is, the sphere of the ultimately real.

  Hear and understand. The man who sought you out, and whom you call the Golem, signifies the awakening of the soul through the innermost life of the spirit. Each thing that earth contains is nothing more than an everlasting symbol clothed in dust. Learn how to think with your eyes. Think with your eyes, as you behold each and every shape. Nothing that takes shape unto itself but was once a spirit.3

  15

  Sexual-Dynamic Polarity as a Magical Formula

  Aleister Crowley’s Views on Gender and Transcendence

  A lecture delivered at Odrörer Oasis OTO, Stockholm, Sweden, 2016.

  WHEN TALKING ABOUT Aleister Crowley’s views on sex and sexuality, you could absolutely say that he was ahead of his times. That was true of him as a person too, of course. On many levels, he was a synthesizing occult pioneer who initiated changes that would later become very important. Of course, he wasn’t an isolated force during this general liberalization of the twentieth century. There were many individuals, things, and movements that opened up many radical developments.

  Crowley’s own environment and background, post-Victorian and bourgeois, wasn’t only attacked by him but also, slightly earlier, by Oscar Wilde and his lover Alfred Douglas. This public scandal brought forth stronger reverberations than those Crowley would later create—much to his disdain and frustration of coursey. But the Wilde scandal was an interesting development at the time, as it broke not only sexual conventions but also other, more deeply rooted ones—specifically an audacious visibility in the public sphere. A certain sexual tolerance toward the cultural sphere has always existed, even in Great Britain.*5 If you cross more lines than the accepted quota, there will be conflict. But out of conflict something new and vital always arises.

  The First World War was obviously a revolutionary force. The effects of four years of brutal war on European soil created an ever-faster swinging pendulum movement between a strongly defined and developed liberalism on the one hand, and a strong and elaborate totalitarianism in communism and National Socialism on the other. Women’s liberation and their right to vote spread quickly in the democratic countries. Woman as a distinct member of society was now suddenly a force to be reckoned with.

  For Crowley, who was born in 1875, this surely meant positive feelings on a philosophical level but perhaps slightly less so in the private sphere. Crowley’s attitude toward women were about as complex as he himself was. When it came to abstracted individuals in a philosophical context every man and every woman was a star with the potential to find out his or her own voice and will. But when it came to his own relationships, things were, as it’s nowadays said, complicated.

  To a great degree, Crowley worked within a utilitarian mind frame, especially from the 1910s and onward. Regardless if we talk about longer relationships or brief rendezvous, Crowley literally wanted to use women as ejaculators of energies that can be directed and create new life in different forms, way, way beyond the conventions of petit bourgeois sexuality. For him, everything was ritual, regardless if the sexual partner in question was aware of it or not.

  In Crowley’s central text, Liber AL (The Book of the Law) there are many references to sexual mysteries and an all-encompassing new set of morals. At the time of the writing of this allegedly channeled text, Crowley wasn’t initiated into sexual mysteries. The text confused and attracted him at the same time. But he did have an intuitive comprehension of how magic works, and he, according to himself at least, was a magical natural force that had appeared in order to change this planet’s destiny in overturning ways. It wasn’t until the 1910s, when he had been in touch with the German fraternal order Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), that he and this group could create a synthesis of what both parties were interested in: sexual magic.

  Liber AL is a cryptic text, difficult to interpret, and furthermore with an official decree that only Crowley in his position as scribe is really allowed to interpret it. The book consists of three chapters, each one clothed in Egyptian terminology. The first chapter, dedicated to the goddess Nuit, describes infinite cosmic potential. In this potential there is pleasure, beauty, and attractional force, but it’s not tangible or perceivable before you have a direction, a goal. This constitutes chapter two, dedicated to Hadit (not to be confused with the Hadith, the prophet Muhammad’s moral codex). When Nuit and Hadit meet in union there is Ra-Hoor-Khuit, which traditionally is an aspect of the main solar deity Ra. In this union exists an aggressive energy with the power both to create and destroy. This trio is what constitutes magical potential in Crowley’s cosmology.

  In the text there is implicitly a formulation or formula that replaces previous magical formulas stemming from Judeo-Christian sources. This is called 0 = 2 or, by simple mathematical logic, 2 = 0. Crowley explained it like this: “Every act of ‘love under will’ has the dual result 1) the creation of a child combining the qualities of its parents, 2) the withdrawal by ecstasy into Nothingness.”1 Just as division of a unity leads to two parts, these two parts can create not only a new unity but also a dissolution in and through the unity in question. Where classic magical formula making up until then had been built on a literally familiar order of succession (Yod, He, Vau, He, Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, new life, etc.), we can now see a considerably
more Asian attitude in Crowley’s mind.

  Most of us are aware, both on instinctive and personal levels, that sex is the most potent form of energy a human being can experience. There is not only the possibility to create new human life but also, at the moment of orgasm, to be an active part of a transcendental experience without comparison. Sex has always been present in magical and religious contexts as a very fundamental part. Either as liberating or enslaving, depending on the society, culture, or reigning power structure in question.

  There were other interesting things going on at this time than Crowley’s awakenings and fascinating Oscar Wilde scandals. Within physics the terms fusion and fission were clarified and codified. That is, the setting free of energy in the interaction of atoms, either through merging or splitting. Put simply: the stronger the attraction is between or within atoms, the stronger the energy set free in the meeting. The Danish scientist Niels Bohr’s work with establishing what was to be called quantum mechanical principles in the energy flows of atoms led to his Nobel Prize in 1922. The German scientist Karl Heisenberg was another giant who received the Nobel Prize in 1932 for the development of quantum mechanics. The relationship between quantum mechanics and magic as a proto-science is so strong that you can almost say that it doesn’t appear to be random that both magic and radical physics developed so quickly and in such a parallel way during the early twentieth century.

  We can talk about it on a human existential level, on a microlevel in atomic perspectives, and on a larger, cosmic level. The sun and the stars simply exist and generate so much energy that it makes our lives possible and facilitates my standing here talking and you listening. Crowley was well aware of these fundamental scientific basics and often referred to a scientific, empirical method in his works. He also called his system “solar-phallic.” The sun is in many ways the highest divine principle and it’s fueled by fusion energy. The highest tangible level or mirroring within the human being of this solar-phallic power is sex, and its main representative, according to Crowley, the male sexual organ.

  However, this is not synonymous with phallic worship, which has been a consistent part of human religious history. The interesting thing from a magico-anthropological perspective is that phallic worship seemed to cease as humans left a holistic attitude within fertility cults and natural religion, not seldom containing hermaphroditic ideals, in favor of a dualism in which man is regarded as active and woman passive—decidedly an Abrahamic, monotheistic metaphor for power structures rather than sexual dynamics per se.