Category Archives: whining

A Musing on Occult Blogging and the Distinction of Passions

November 11, 2022 By in news, whining Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

That recent post I made was definitely a wild one, I admit.  It’s extremely rare that I use this blog as a platform for an outright call-out or attack on anyone or anything, and it’s not something I enjoy doing or want to make a habit of.  After all, what I enjoy most about blogging is blogging about the things I actively enjoy reading, writing, studying, and practicing, and me getting involved with drama or current events just distracts me from writing about that and my readers from reading about that.  When I make a post like that, it’s because I feel it’s part of my moral and ethical responsibility to do so.  Last time I did something like this, it was to call out the old admin of the now defunct Hermetic Agora Discord server, and after that, I mulled in a follow-up post about the social and esoteric implications of the underlying issues that led to such a call-out post to begin with.  Like then, I want to unpack and muse over this more recent call-out, too.

To be sure, November 7 2022 (when I made my call-out post about Gordon White and Rune Soup being a toxic and violent influence in the online occult community and having been so for years now) is now officially the most well-viewed day for my blog in its history, beating out the previous record set ten years prior to the day (November 7 2012) when this blog (quiet and meek as it was) was hit by an abnormally large botnet raid or scan or somesuch that sent my views skyrocketing into the many thousands.  While I’m glad that my call-out post earlier in the week was so well- and widely-received to get the word out (I’ve had dozens of friends and colleagues reach out privately to me thanking me for such a post, in addition to the many more who did so publicly at the risk of their being raided online), the absurd hit count I got earlier in the week (and which I’m continuing to get day by day to a lesser degree) is a stark reminder of something I’ve neglected about interacting with things online: “rage sells”.  Those two words are at the crux of so many problems involving all sorts of media that we have today, both online and offline, both social and static.  It’s why extreme polarization in large swaths of the population happens because of mere mainstream news banking on increased viewership from rage-inducing stories; it’s why we get far-right/alt-right terrorists merely by watching YouTube autoplay a series of videos that lead from Enya and Minecraft to Jordan Petersen and worse; it’s why social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter have warped to the breaking point the very conceptions of “relationship” and “community” for so many people that lead such companies to build algorithms to enflame people’s emotions.

“Rage sells”, and I admit, my last post was, in many senses of the word, rage (although I consider it a righteous rage against someone behaving harmfully and who is a detriment to the online occult community).  Did I want to get a good hit count on that post?  Absolutely; it’s part of me getting the word out.  Did I expect that much of an increase across my blog generally, whether that rapidly or that sustained?  Did I expect that much of an increase in my follower/viewer numbers, even after taking into account all the people that split from me (or from Twitter generally)?  No, actually!  And that simple fact serves as a reminder as to why some people act the way they do online.  Without wanting to harp on him too much (that was very much the point of the last post after all), Gordon White does just this very thing: lashing out and attacking anyone and everyone repeatedly and often who doesn’t fall in line with his conspiracy-addled rage.  Despite his encouragements to his readers that they should live their lives free from rage (which he calls “hate”—a difference I’ll get to later) in their hearts, he is still relying on preserving and cultivating such rage (both on his blog and his Twitter, projecting and deflecting the time to shift the narrative to suit his needs) in order to keep people engaged with him.  Of course, he’s far from the only one who does this, so it’s not fair (even to him) to paint him as some extreme outlier on this front.  Enflamed emotions encourage engagement; that’s basically a truth for social media nowadays, where you can find endless articles about how emotional engagement is the key to viral content marketing, study after study about what emotions trigger increased engagement and how strongly each kind of emotion influences engagement, and so on and so forth.

I mean…for a more humorous take:

I’m not about that kind of life, that kind of media propagation or content generation, and I don’t want to be.

As I said in the last post, and as I said above, I’m just here doing my thing, and my thing is writing about the occult, spirituality, religion, mysticism, magic, divination, and other kinds of esoterica, and even from its earliest days (although far more pronounced now) was centered on Hermeticism.  This blog has always been about that, and will always be about that.  And yes, to be sure, I do make a few ebook PDFs for sale as a sort of “intensely-produced content” for those who want to go beyond the abundance of stuff I write publicly, and while I’m still on hiatus, I do hope one day to get back to doing readings and consultations for people—but, all that said, I’m not really here to market myself.  I don’t go out of my way beyond a notification post when I come up with something new (which isn’t common) to sell a product, and I’m definitely not trying to corner a market or develop some sort of base of paying viewers to give me money on a constant basis.  That’s never been my goal, and never will be my goal.  My goal for this blog is to just do magic and mysticism and to share what I find in the course of studying, researching, and practicing that.  Being on social media in general is just a way to further that and emphatically not the purpose of me doing that—and that’s a distinction that a lot more people should bear in mind when they get into developing their own stuff.  It should always be remembered, after all, that “substance” is not the same thing as “content”.

As a lot of people clued into online events are aware, Twitter is going through something of A Time right now, what with Elon Musk’s recent takeover of the platform and quickly showing the world how hilariously bad he is at…well, everything that isn’t just spending money.  As a result, that’s leading a lot of people to consider different social media platforms, whether it’s returning to Tumblr, resuming interest in Mastodon or Counter.Social, or jumping to new platforms like Cohost (though, hilariously, I can’t find anyone actually mentioning anything about staying on or going back to Facebook).  I mused about social media a bit on Twitter a few days back, and realized that all that social media platforms do for us is the equivalent of each of us making our own website and us bookmarking each others’ websites, putting all those bookmarks in a folder in our browser.  Sure, social media platforms standardize, aggregate, and make convenient this whole process, but that’s basically what it is at heart.  When I made this observation on Twitter, someone commented their view that they don’t fully trust people involved in their circles who “don’t have a basic bloc, a place to put things outside of the algorithm”.  That’s a viewpoint that I wholeheartedly agree with, to be sure, and it raises a really neat distinction between someone who uses social media as a means for something that isn’t a part of it or built within it, and someone who uses social media as an end unto itself.

I admit that I enjoy seeing numbers go up (who doesn’t? it’s like points in a video game), and I do think it’s really neat that I have several thousand followers online across multiple social media platforms (including, if we go with a Web 2.0-based notion here of what qualifies as “social media”, this blog itself on WordPress).  Still, though, my main purpose for being on social media is an emphasis on being social (to communicate and relate to others online), rather than it being merely media (to share or propagate content); it’s a neat thing that I get to share my writing and project on Twitter or Facebook, but I’m not on social media in order to spread my blog.  That I have so many viewers is neat, but let’s be honest: I would still be writing about the things I do whether I had 10 followers or 10000.  I don’t write to get engagements, I don’t blog to get views, I don’t post to be famous; I write, blog, and post because I have things I just want to write, blog, and post about.  I write for the sake of writing, not just to keep myself in check with my own studies (and to give myself a reference and a record to look back on over the years), but also to help share things I find useful so that others might derive some benefit from my writing.

Still, exploiting emotion is a great way for people on social media to get numbers to go up in general, but that’s not what I want to do; if it happens, I want there to be a good reason for it besides benefitting my blog.  I mean, who am I to enflame people’s emotions in general?  While I claim that there’s a distinction between “righteous anger” and “non-righteous anger” in how it arises, can be expressed, and affects us as human beings, I still remember what CH XIII.7 talks about as irrational tormentors of matter:

This ignorance, my child, is the first torment; the second is grief; the third is incontinence; the fourth, lust; the fifth, injustice; the sixth, greed; the seventh, deceit; the eighth, envy; the ninth, treachery; the tenth, anger; the eleventh, recklessness; the twelfth, malice. These are twelve in number, but under them are many more besides, my child, and they use the prison of the body to torture the inward person with the sufferings of sense.

It’s that tenth one, “anger”, that I want to draw attention to.  The Greek word used here originally is ὀργή, which Salaman, Copenhaver, Mead, and Scott all translate as “anger”, which is an eminently reasonable translation for it.  However, looking up the full meaning and use of this word more generally, we can see that it eventually came to include notions of anger or wrath stemming from a meaning of “natural impulse, propensity, temperament, disposition, mood”.  To me, my understanding here isn’t of ὀργή to refer to what I’d consider “righteous anger”, which is a rational aversion to and desire to fix something that is morally and ethically wrong.  Rather, I’d see it as representing the anger that arises from thumos, the “emotional drive” (often discussed alongside epithumia “appetitive desire”) which is a baser, nonrational passion arising from body-centered ego (tellingly, the Perseus-Tufts online dictionary above notes that we don’t find ὀργή/ὀργάς in Homeric texts, who uses θύμος instead).

Consider a Stoic parallel: for most negative passions (πάθῃ pathē), there are also corresponding good feelings (εὐπάθεια eupatheia).  For the Stoic, there are four high-level categories of passions, a combination of whether they are valued as good or bad, and whether they relate to things in the present or future.  The passion of good things in the present is pleasure, and good things in the future is appetite/desire; the passion of bad things in the present is distress, and bad things in the future is fear.  These are inherently nonrational impulses and mistaken judgments that arise to cause us emotional disquietude, but there are also appropriate and rational impulses and correct judgment that serve to bring one to emotional peace.  Corresponding to the passion of pleasure is joy, to fear is caution, and to appetite/desire is reasonable wishing (though there is no rational correspondent to fear).  The difference here is that a Stoic may well wish for something to happen, but in a way appropriate to the thing itself and the Stoic’s relationship to it, as opposed to an irrational, mistaken mere instance of appetite/desire.

In a similar way, I claim that not all anger—one might even say not all “hate”—is the same, and that there are healthful expressions of what might be apparent as and equivalent to baser kinds even though they are nothing of the sort.  For my part, consider the line from the Headless Rite that says “I am the Truth who hates the fact that unjust deeds are done in the world” (Ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ Ἀλήθεια, ὁ μισῶν ἀδικήματα γίνεσθαι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ Egṓ eimi hē Alḗtheia, ho misôn adikḗmata gínesthai en tôy kósmōy).  “Hate” here is just the word μισέω, which really just means “hate”, but what do we mean by “hate”?  Hatred is, at its core, a strong aversion or intense dislike of something, an unwillingness to suffer something.  Sometimes hate can arise from mere opinion and irrational desire, sure, but sometimes it can also arise as the logical and rational consequence of particular ethics and morals that one has cultivated and developed, and if those ethics and morals are well-founded, then hate of a thing directed by such ethics and morals must necessarily be followed as an extension of those ethics and morals.  In that light, while “hate” for some people may well be emotionally-driven, for others it may instead be logically- and rationally-driven.  And this is still something distinct from “rage”, which is merely an indulgence in one’s baser, lower, ego-driven emotions.

When I make a call-out post (as I did with DanKadmos from the Hermetic Agora, the Temple of the Hermetic One, the oppressive acts of the previous US presidential administration during the protests in 2020, racism and fascism and violence against movements like Black Lives Matter, or the like), is there emotion involved?  Sure; I’m still human and definitely no sage.  However, I don’t like wasting my time writing posts like this, and I don’t want to waste my readers’ time in reading posts like this unless there’s a reason that I think justifies the time; if I just want to bitch about something, I keep it to Twitter (if I think it’s funny enough to get a few people to laugh) or (far more commonly) I just keep my mouth shut.  I don’t write call-out posts just to get people upset and enraged, because that’s something I find abhorrent from a moral and ethical perspective, much less a Hermetic one that seeks to quell one’s temper and passions in order to attain higher and more refined states of spiritual development.  I write these posts to get people to act in a way I think helps the world and helps make the world a better place.  I write such posts not as a distraction from my usual writing here, but as a logical extension and result of the practice of living what I write about here.  It is as much part of the message and goal of what I do here as everything else.

As I mentioned in my last post, I fully expected that making such a post about someone so popular in the online occult sphere was going to be divisive, drive people away from me and my writings, cause my much-vaunted numbers to drop, and so on.  And yanno what?  That’s just fine with me.  As I’ve said before in no unclear terms, if people are willing to support horrible things, then I’d much rather they not read my stuff at all.  For all that some people might cry out about others being “hateful” towards them, consider what I said about what “hate” actually means: if you’re willing to suffer or tolerate (or even encourage or rejoice in) things that I make no qualms about being detestable or despicable to me (and with good reason!), then I’m not sure what I have to offer you or what you might hope to find here besides a few tricks nestled amidst my words.  If, after reading and considering what it is I have to say, all that still drives you away from me or makes you want to unfollow me on my blog or Twitter or what-have-you: good.  Go on with your life, and I genuinely hope you do better wherever you go than you are now.

I’m not playing this game to earn a name for myself or to build up a sycophantic echo chamber around myself; in truth, I’m not playing any sort of game at all.  I’m just here doing my thing, as I ever have.  That’s what I encourage others to do, too, both online and off: focus on what it is you want to do, for its own glorious sake as much as you possibly can, and let people rejoice at that and with you in that.  Just remember that, whatever you do, you should do all of it—and that includes the stuff that you might find distasteful but which goes along with all the rest.

Dump the Rotten Soup: A Note on Gordon White

November 7, 2022 By in internet, news, whining Tags: , , , , , , 19 Comments

I don’t take pleasure in calling people out, but occasionally it has to be done, especially when the person being called out is actively engaging in harmful, hateful things.  Even when it’s proper and righteous to do so, some people find it hard, especially if the person they’re calling out has a large following or if there are political, financial, or safety reasons at play.  Everyone has their own concerns they need to take stock of, and for that reason, not everyone who deserves a call-out gets one.

A few days ago on Twitter, I did my part to call out Gordon White of Rune Soup, around which the Rune Soup Premium Membership (RSPM) is focused.  This was several years late by my reckoning (for which I apologize), but I saw an opportune moment to do so, and decided that something like this is better late than never.  To that end, if you read Gordon’s blog and see his (hilariously awkward and infantile attempts of) attacks at me, this is why; he’s lashing out because someone dared to speak up against him (although I’m far from the only one to do so).  He is not someone to take seriously, much less take classes from; he is a far and sad cry from being any sort of champion of chaos magic, instead descending to little more than anti-vax right-wing grifting.

For those who aren’t on Twitter or have made the choice to ignore it, indulge me if you will.  For recordkeeping’s sake, I’ll list the relevant Twitter threads I made below for you to read at your leisure:

  1. In which I call out Gordon White and Rune Soup for being involved in violent and anti-vax rhetoric while drumming up a personality cult around him
  2. In which I make fun of his subsequent (and hilariously clumsy) attack on me from a blog post he made in response to the above thread
  3. In which I call out his hypocrisy in trying to pillory me for my employment
  4. Ditto, this time him trying to lambast me for being involved in an ATR while employed as I am
  5. In which I share a screenshot of Gordon saying that the COVID vaccines “literally cause AIDS”
  6. In which I share a screenshot of Gordon sharing extremist, partisan, conspiracy “news sources” that engage in evangelical Christian end-of-the-world conspiracies (think Cain, Satan, nuclear war, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, etc.)
  7. In which I make fun of another attack on me for my employment and priesthood (see thread #4 above)

I encourage you all to read the posts above if you can; if nothing else, they should be fairly entertaining, and there’s plenty of commentary from myself and others in the many replies thereof.  I’ll be referring to them and screenshots shared there, since I’m going to go against my usual practice and instead refrain from linking at all to Gordon’s blog or Twitter feed (he doesn’t deserve the traffic from my site).  I may, however, link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine records of his website, however, depending on the need.

Oh, and yeah, him saying that COVID vaccines cause AIDS thing is very much real.  Let’s just get that out of the way first while we’re here.  Below is a screenshot of something he said in his private RSPM groups, and it’s far from the only such thing he’s said (alongside the tired variants on how vaccines cause autism, etc.).  Those who’ve been following Rune Soup know that Gordon has said some awful stuff in general when it comes to medicine, healthcare, and the vulnerable, but he says so much worse stuff behind closed doors.  And, as an out gay man himself (and myself, I should note!), I feel like he should have at least some sort of shame about invoking the HIV/AIDS crisis in this horrific, self-serving way.

Anyway, let me share my original statement regarding Gordon White.  It built off of a quote-tweet by Marco Visconti, in which he asked “Are we all still ok with the fake permaculture shaman to keep on serving virulent anti-vaxxer rhetoric alongside his abysmal rune soup?”.  I know I wasn’t and hadn’t been for some time, so I decided to let my thoughts be known clearly:

The only place for Rune Soup, honestly, is down the drain. It’d been bad for a while, and I really don’t know what else to tell people except to stay away from Gordon White’s stuff at this point, given all the hubristic, hateful, and violent ranting coming from him and his blog.

I used to like him, I was a supporter of his stuff, I joined in on his classes, and it was great while it lasted, but…well, as it turned out, GW/RS is a fine example of spirituality mingling with conspiracy to make conspirituality—which is as much a con as anything else.

It’s not just me that’s picked up on this; I tuned out of GW/RS’s stuff a good while back after he gladly invited some unfortunate people on his show, but others’ve kept up and have better receipts.
https://sublunar.space/2021-04-drinking-the-kool-soup.html
https://codexastarte.substack.com/p/waiter-theres-a-fly-in-my-rune-soup
https://codexastarte.substack.com/p/waiter-theres-a-fly-in-my-rune-soup-f5a

The RT’d thread above has quite a few replies by people I know, like, and trust who have been more involved in RSPM than I ever was, or who have kept up even more on GW/RS and can talk more about the stuff they can trace both to and from his stuff. It’s worth a (sobering) read.

Far be it from me to speculate about GW’s private issues, but from my perspective, he’s become a stereotype of the addled fake guru-turned-cult-leader peddling bad predictions couched in feel-good nonsense. He’s far gone from the practice-oriented chaos magic champion of yore.

I know I have a lot of RSPM folk among my friends+followers, and I hope you know what you’re doing with open eyes and a clear mind if/when you continue to involve yourself with GW/RS. For me? I can’t condone the conspiratorially crazy or crasslessly crude.

I also note that GW/RS is developing more and more of an extreme right-wing readership. Between that and the constant edgelordy gnosticism (which already attracts an ugly underbelly of Internet-addled trolls), the ambiance of his audience is not one I’d want to associate with.

The past few years have done a number on a lot of people, that much is certain, and it’s given a lot of people the chance to gleefully take off their masks in more ways than one—and sometimes, there’s worse to deal with than just someone’s odious breath.

Twitter being what it is, something like this spread quickly.  Now, going into this, I knew that this was going to hit a lot of people in different ways, and I know that I have many people I consider friends or colleagues who are or were part of RSPM or who are otherwise fans of Gordon.  Although it shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone who pays attention to the things I say when it comes to politics or science, I know my own silence regarding Gordon specifically may have led some into some false sense of alliance between my and Gordon’s views, which I’ve since publicly rebuked and repudiated as being repulsive and vile.  By speaking out, I knew I was gonna make at least some people upset.

And, predictably (given how he’s reacted in the past to other people who’ve called him out along similar lines), Gordon wrote a post of his own on his website in a matter of hours attempting to pillory me.  A screenshot of the post in question:

A transcript:

I’m sure you all remember my pompous, Tory, cokehead little stalker still hopping mad that he isn’t -and never will be- me. From memory, Sam is some kind of federal IT bureaucrat so I guess he knows where his bread is buttered. Only a personality who could endure such a job could also be responsible for the unremittingly boring and lengthy blog posts that always fail to distinguish between what hermetic texts actually say versus the words they contain. The only magic in them is a cure for insomnia. All of this is to say I guess his dumb little take is not very surprising.

Anyway, this is what I have the distinct pleasure of dealing with while I go about my fake permaculturing and my fake shamaning. (Including bringing the work of Indigenous elders from around the world to public attention for the first time.) Apparently that’s ‘hate’, according to Sam. Apparently his grumpy little Tory cokehead friend’s repeated instances of misogyny and homophobia isn’t ‘hate’. (Fun bonus fact: Sam is gay.)

I find it comical how he described me and my blog in literally the exact opposite terms in his interview with me from September 2017, but so it goes, I suppose.  As for whatever insults he has for Marco, that’s a whole thing that’s its own debacle unto itself; Gordon likes to cry about being bullied while throwing insults like this, even to the point of making up identities for him to play his own brand of identity politics with, and it goes well beyond just Marco.  It all just blends into background noise after a point when you go through his blog archives.

The rest of his post isn’t worth the read; it’s just so much him whining about how misunderstood he is (despite his ample writing over the years that make abundantly clear what he believes) and how his followers should take the moral high road when it comes to haters (though I doubt they’d do well at that by following his example).  In this specific blurb riddled with ad-homimems, however, Gordon not only attempts to dox me (name, employer, and sexuality—none of which I’ve ever kept a secret, but it’s still a class act of him lashing out) but also makes a pathetic attempt at insulting me and my writing, to which I have two things to say:

  1. Sorry not sorry that my blog posts can get a bit long so that I can produce things of substance instead of mere content, or that I don’t just copy-paste other people’s half-read opinions and share them as some sort of deep truth of my own like some people do.
  2. Sorry not sorry that I use textual criticism because I care about getting things right for real implementation instead of following hucksters who call for harm against people doing meaningful work.

There’s also the “white savior” complex he brings into this, too; it shouldn’t be forgotten that Gordon has made a huge hubbub in recent years about his “shaman certification” that he received (after paying something around $10k for) from Alberto Villoldo, a Cuban psychologist who developed a form of neo-shamanism based on Peruvian and other South American practices, though not without controversy of his own regarding the (severe) impropriety of him doing so, which casts doubt on the very legitimacy of what Gordon inflates and reminds people of constantly.  Although, let’s be honest, it’s not like figuring out how legitimate such a “shamanic healing” practice would be given how Gordon himself talks about and markets it:

In addition to what he said about me on his blog, he also said a few unfortunate things about me on his Twitter, trying to shame me for my employment as a low-level software engineer for the United States federal government.  I’ve never kept this a secret, although I don’t bring up which specific agency beyond saying that it’s one of the calmer apolitical ones in existence.  I know what my job consists of and how it impacts people (and Gordon by his own admission doesn’t, I should note), but I don’t bring it up because nothing I say online or on this blog is ever said from the perspective of a federal employee.  To be sure, the United States as a whole has caused atrocious horrors the whole world over; I’d never deny that.  However, for Gordon (who has built so much of his blogging career on talking about elaborate non-systems and how so many things supposedly interconnect and interrelate to the point of outright unfounded conspiracy theories), there is no nuance here; I am paid by the government, and therefore I am among the worst of archons all unto myself.  Specifically, he now holds me to be responsible for “the most dangerous organisation on earth, that literally turns brown children to paste” and also “responsible for Latin America’s disadvantaged condition, as well as the death of about a million Latins”.  Sure, the US government is to blame for that, yet to impugn me as specifically responsible for this is just puerile, ungrounded, and unhinged finger-pointing on his end.  He also seems to take a special, sick joy in also attacking my initiation as a priest in La Regla de Ocha Lucumí (aka Santería, an Afro-Caribbean orisha religion) which he somehow finds ironic in this context, I guess, all the while woefully ignorant of its history and context. (At least I can trace my priesthood by name back to my forebears with others to attest to its legitimacy, something Gordon can’t with his “shamanic certification”.)

What he’s trying to do (though inexpertly) is shame me for my privilege in how I am so obviously and intimately tied up in the reckless destruction of human life across the world generally and Latin America specifically—all the while boasting about his own descent from British colonial administrators in the Pacific and using that to his lifelong advantage, working for global media companies and immersing himself in the active pushing of government-sanctioned/-directed propaganda to influence people the whole world over, and running in the same circles as actual royalty of colonialist empires and actual billionaires.  He says so right on his own website’s About page, and I swear by the gods above and below that I am not making this up (with the important and rather telling-on-oneself bits bolded by myself):

Australian by birth, Gordon White’s family has strong connections to the wider South Pacific thanks to his grandfather’s experience in colonial administration in Nauru and New Guinea. He spent much of his early years exploring and diving in Micronesia, Melanesia and Polynesia.

[…]

After moving to London, he held senior data and analytics positions in global media companies, as well as starting a chaos magic blog and podcast called Rune Soup… which ultimately led to the publication of his first three books, The Chaos Protocols, Star.Ships: A Prehistory of the Spirits and Pieces of Eight.

[…]

Fun trivia about Gordon:

  • He has been in both the actual DeLorean from Back To The Future and the Batmobile from the original Adam West series.
  • He is distantly related to Sir Isaac Newton.
  • He accidentally ended up at the same party as Prince Harry.
  • He has lived on two volcanoes.
  • He has dived on a sunken city.
  • Sir Richard Branson once bought him a bottle of champagne.
  • He is obsessed with sharks.

I think it’s clear to say that Gordon White isn’t some sort of Joe Six-Pack, some sort of common man that disempowered people should relate to.  He is very much a product of the same old money and colonialist regimes that he instead tries to pillory me (and others!) for.  Rather than responsibly accounting for his own privilege, he instead builds his whole career on his privilege being a predicate for everything he’s done, up to and including buying his own farm (which he struggles with) to live out some sort of prepper’s dream to deal with his own midlife crisis.  Rather than making use of his privilege and his experience with the self-same archons that he developed his whole “archonology” theorycrafting about to actually help people, he’s more inclined to perpetuate and propagate those same tendencies and strengths to bend people around him to stoop to his insanity even more.

I could go on, but if you take a look at what I linked to above and Marco Visconti’s original tweet (and all the replies from the many other people to it), you’ll see so much more of this in tired abundance.  Between the non-ironic shares of “news articles” from extremist/conspiracy rags like Expose News or Rebel News, the calls for violence against healthcare workers, the piles of anti-vax rhetoric that he only ever doubles down on (and now seems to be making his whole brand), the extremely improper “medical advice” he gives for people to deal with the vaccine (including talking about turpentine enemas to extract toxins)…it’s not great.  But this is who he is; this is what he does.

While Gordon has definitely and publicly gone off the rails in the COVID-19 pandemic and how traumatized he was by not being able to travel so freely anymore (quelle horreur!), it’s not like his right-wing extremism is a new thing.  He’s shown tendencies towards New Right ideology in posts dating back at least to 2015, invoking the likes of Ernst Jünger for the sake of rebellion against multiculturalism.  Taking a page out of his own conspiracy/archonology playbook, if there’s one thing Gordon is good at, it’s using, twisting, and adapting language to suit his own self-serving needs—although anyone with a head on their shoulders and their eyes open can see clearly what it is he’s doing.  (The irony of him using Mark Twain’s quote in his recent posts of “it’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled” would be so satisfying if it weren’t so nauseating in this context.)

This blogpost of mine is not intended to be something like Fr. Pera’s documentation of the Nazi occultist Georgina Rose aka Da’at Darling; I’m not tracking all of the awful things Gordon has said or encouraged people to do over the years, as that’s a far greater endeavor than I have the time or energy for, especially when I’ve spent the past few years content with just ignoring him.  However, at this point, the harm he’s causing through his violent rhetoric (all the while couched in feel-good holistic woo and Ursula Le Guin quotes) is simply too much to keep silent on, and so I refuse to any longer.  This is why I spoke out several days ago on Twitter, and is why I’m speaking out now on my blog (which I hope, dear reader, hasn’t been “unremittingly boring” for you).  I simply share what I have at hand about why I’m saying these things, all to make this point: Gordon White is not someone to follow, learn from, or give one’s money to.  I am simply letting people know what he’s actually doing and saying behind his cultivated online presence.

A call-out like this is not going to make me many friends, or so I assume; I’ve already had some (albeit happily not many) people distance themselves from me, calling me an “unhinged tweet spree hate message spreader” or just simply “scum” (for real).  And, yanno what?  It’s honestly no skin off my nose for being called names for calling out someone who seems to want to start a cult around himself.  Unlike Gordon, I’m not trying to corner some market, cultivate some personality cult, or take advantage of people with an obvious grift that preys on people’s enflamed emotions and vulnerability with far-right propaganda-bot-fueled talking points during a global pandemic (and worse).  I’m just here doing my thing, and that’s all I care about; to that end, I just want to make sure that people are well-prepared with the knowledge they need regarding one of the bigger (and more harmful) names in the modern occult community today.  Hence, this blog post, which I hope will be the only one I ever have to write about him, since I’d like to get back to my habit of not having to think about him or reluctantly visit his website/Twitter when someone tells me about some new odious thing he wrote with my name on it.  Since I’ve solidly earned a place on his shitlist, I fully anticipate that he’ll continue ranting and whining about me with bungled attempts at defaming me or shaming me while ignoring the breathtaking hypocrisy or outright ignorance involved in him doing so; I don’t care.

While I don’t expect to deconvert anyone already stuck on Gordon’s bullshit (though hope springs eternal!), I do want to spread the awareness of his bullshit all the same, to let others know who have been picking up on some of these rancid smells that it’s not just them, to let people know that there are those willing to speak out against him despite his following, and to offer an explanation of why my name is coming out of his execrable mouth.  Despite his holier-than-thou railing against people with hate in their hearts, I’m not someone so full of hate like Gordon is in this; I am only (in the words of the Headless Rite) someone “who hates the fact that unjust deeds are done in the world”.  The Rune Soup really is rotten, and the sooner we dump it, the better off we’ll all be.

PS: I am uninterested in reading defenses of bloviating, conspiracy-addled, rage-spreading hucksters, despite what you might have learned from them or how good a friend they might be to you; they can defend and redeem themselves by changing their own apparent behavior and character. And yanno what? I’d love for these kinds of people to do just that! I’m not about playing a game of tit-for-tat to garner support or leverage social media engagement; I just want us all to do better. So please, if you’ve got something to share in support of Gordon or similar people, just save your breath and keystrokes, and instead let them show who they are by their own words and works.

To Keep On Keeping On

September 12, 2022 By in hermetica, occult, whining Tags: , , , , , 1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at or used CuriousCat (remember all those posts and tweets from back in the day?), but that doesn’t mean I stopped replying to questions generally.  Whether it’s on Discord or over email or on Facebook or whatever, I still try to keep myself open to discussion, explanation, and sharing ideas or notions when people ask.  And, recently, two people pinged me on two different platforms separately with basically the same question: how do I deal with doubt and disbelief in my spiritual life?

Phrased one way (on Discord):

A question about faith: a lot of what I have read is about awakening to the understanding of the Truth, but do you ever struggle with faith itself?  Like, do you ever have days where you wake up and doubt everything you’ve read, and wonder if it isn’t all just a comfort to soothe the human condition?  And what helps you in those moments?

Phrased another way (over email):

How do you deal with doubt and belief?  I’ve been an on-and-off practitioner of the Hermetic path, but I have always had doubt and lack of belief that any of this is real, whether I’m wasting my time studying this or whether I’m a fool for believing in magic. How do I deal with these doubts?

When multiple people ask me separately the same question all at once, I think that’s a good thing to discuss publicly, because chances are they’re not the only ones with such questions.

As I read it, the questions I were asked above got the same answer, which I’ll share below:

The easy and short answer is that I don’t do anything to deal with these issues, and that nothing really helps with concerns about doubt or lack of faith—nothing, at least, beyond just carrying on.  For me, these moments of doubt or struggles I might have with faith (and I do absolutely have them from time to time) are little more than passing moods; nothing renders me unshakably confident in these things beyond just going back to the texts and reminding myself of why I’m doing this at all, and what got me here to begin with.

Like, the whole point of me doing all of this <waves vaguely> is because, ultimately, I’m not convinced. I’m here to find out and experience all this stuff for myself, to show to myself that this stuff is experientially real. Hermēs Trismegistos doesn’t preach “believe or perish”, after all; he teaches “believe and find out” (a similar notion to the saying “trust but verify”). And so far, so much of what I’ve seen, read, and done in a Hermetic context has worked and shown itself to be basically as Hermēs discusses it that I have good reason to believe the rest (for the most part) is good, too. I just need to keep going to see for myself.

When it comes to magic specifically, sure, I occasionally doubt the efficacy and meaning of what it is I’m doing. And then I go back to the stories I’ve heard from others about their successful workings, and I go back to my own experiences that have shown me incontrovertibly that this stuff works and that I’m not just making it up. (I mean, everything is made up to one degree or another. What matters isn’t whether something is made up and real, but rather whether something is made up and works.)

While it’d be great to have an unshakeable faith in this stuff with a level of confidence that flatly doesn’t permit doubt, I don’t think I’m at that level yet (though I am working towards it). Much like my own sensitivity to what other people think of me, over time, concerns of that nature just diminish and eventually go away. I don’t have to do anything about it, so long as it doesn’t keep me from actively doing what I need to do along my own spiritual path and journey; doubts and fears like this only become a problem if they actively get in my way from practicing. And, really, “practice” is what all this is really about: we don’t call it the Great Work for nothing! We’re constantly working at it, and we’re constantly practicing it to get better at it. So long as we keep that up, we’re doing just what we need to do.

I know it can get hard at times, but let’s be honest: we wouldn’t be doing it if it were easy.  This isn’t to say that we should be suffering all the time, but this is just part of the challenge we have to work through and work past.  The only thing to do is to keep doing it.  The Work is easy in good times, to be sure, but it actually becomes work in the hard times, and that’s what matters.  We labor and toil, and eventually we reap and we feast, but if you don’t do the work, you don’t get the rewards.  It can feel hopeless at times, but even though hope is what often gets us through the day, having hope isn’t the point; the point is to just do the work, come what may.

Heavenly Thoughts

August 8, 2022 By in hermetica, philosophy, whining Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

I don’t recall which grade it was, probably late elementary school or sometime in middle school, but I recall one time riding the bus with the rest of my classmates from some field trip or another.  Middle of the day, clear bright weather.  There I am, my usual introverted child self, maybe some age between like 9 and 12, sitting by the window starting outside watching the landscape go past—and there I am, thinking my thoughts as I was, and it struck me:

Gosh, the sky is big.

Which, like…duh.  I asked the kid next to me (I’ve long since forgotten who) if they ever thought about how big the sky was, to which they give a (in hindsight utterly predictable) answer of pure confusion and dismissal, a combined “no” and “duh”.  I shrugged off their reply and went back at staring out the window.  I don’t remember anything else about that trip, or even what grade it was, but I remember the sudden childlike awe that struck me when it dawned on me how immeasurably huge the sky is.

Which is weird, right?  I mean, there hasn’t been a single day in my life that I haven’t seen the sky.  Sometimes it’s clear, sometimes it’s cloudy; sometimes I see the Sun, other times the Moon, other times only stars (and even then, maybe more or fewer depending on light pollution).  Somedays I go outside with the sky directly overhead, other days I stay inside and see it from my window, but there has never been a single day I can recall where I haven’t seen the sky once.  It’s always there, it’s always been there, and it always will be there.  It stretches from east to west and from north to south, a complete 360° circle, forming the illusion of a complete and total dome around the boundary of the horizon.  And yet, for some reason, in this one bizarre moment, I only realized just then how big the sky actually is.

And yet, every now and then, in the intervening years, it’ll dawn on me all over again, with almost the same impact as it did the first time.  As it did earlier today while I was taking an afternoon walk around my neighborhood.

Thinking back on it, and all the times I remember that instance and all the times I get hit with it, I realize now what actually triggered it.  Sometimes I’ll be lying on my back on the ground staring up at the sky, but that isn’t what trigger it (although, if you trick your brain, you can kinda make it feel like you’re stuck to some sort of ceiling facing a bottomless pit, which is neat, too).  What triggered this realization was, sitting on that older kind of school bus with the plain seats and cheap industrial interior, the fact that I was staring at the sky from a window—and realizing that the sky exceeded the frame of the window itself.

Intellectually, of course, I knew that the sky would go past the boundaries of a single small window (it literally exceeds all boundaries!), but I think what I realized in that moment was that the sky could not be bounded, could not be contained, and just staring out the window with a bit of tired-relaxed-eye vision to see both the sky and the window through which I saw it helped me come to that realization.  Whether or not the window is just one of a series and you’re just looking through a single pane, or whether it’s a single window in a wall, the sky will always fill the window, and just keep going past it.  Heck, you could look up outside at the sky between the tops of trees on a street, or the sky between tall buildings in an alleyway, and you’ll see the same thing: there is nothing that could ever actually limit the sky.  It just keeps going, well past the point where you yourself can see it.

It’s like…consider your own eyesight.  You have your field of view, and while some people have better peripheral vision (things outside the direct center of your sight) than others, everyone has limits to their field of view.  Now, dear reader, if you’ll indulge me in a bit of an exercise: consider your own field of view.  Become aware of the limits of your sight, how far you’re able to look from left to right and top to bottom, with one or both eyes.  You don’t need to move your eyes or anything, just relax your eyes slightly and just…become aware of your whole field of vision.

Now try to look past that, say, further to your right than your right eye actually can see.  Don’t try to move your eyes to the right, but just try to look further to the right than what you’re actually seeing in your field of view.  Look to the right into the space where you can’t look anymore.

Feels weird, right?  Almost like a paradox; your eyes aren’t designed for that, even from at the level of your own skin right down to the level of your optical nerves.  How can you see anything when you literally don’t have the field of vision to see?  How can you look  in a direction when there’s nothing there to look?  How can you get input from a source that you are literally unequipped to receive input from?

Try it again.  Don’t move your eyes, don’t try to strain them or give yourself a headache.  Just as you became aware of your field of vision as it is, try to become aware of what is outside your field of vision.  Perhaps just start with the area to the right outside your field of vision like before, or (if you’re bold) the whole area outside your entire field of vision, as if you were looking backwards while facing forwards.

Your brain is probably racing at this point, trying to figure out what sort of image to supply there for something that literally has no image.  For most people, it’ll be whirling around in a confusion, since you’re trying to tell it to do something that it naturally knows what to do normally but it’s operating in an undefined area here.  Should you just perceive an inky blackness, a void devoid of any image at all?  Should you perceive static, like a TV disconnected from any input cable?  Should you perceive what you know is actually outside your field of view, mentally constructing it from memory rather than from sense of sight?  Should you perceive the inside of your own flesh and skull, veins and tendons and all?

That feeling you get from trying to look past your own field of view is the same kind of feeling I get about the sky in general.  Just as with the limitations on your field of view, where you can just turn to see a bit more to the left or right or up or down depending on how you turn, you can just look out the window a bit more from a different angle, or poke your head out and crane your neck to get a bigger view of the sky to see more of it.  But there will always be parts you can’t see, parts you know are there, but the perception of which—the mere feeling of the perception of which—simply exceed your capacity to perceive.

And, again, that makes sense; of course the sky would do that, because it’s the sky.  But I think what stuck with me then, and what continues to stick with me now, is the sheer feeling of Unlimitedness that this is all so intimately bound up with.  Interminability, infinity, immeasurability, boundlessness, endlessness—these are all things that the sky is perhaps one of the best, most physical, and most immediately accessible representations of these notions that we have.  Unlike any building we might inhabit, any land we might tread, any sea we might sail, any road we might walk, any depth we might plumb, there is nothing on this planet that is as unlimited as the sky itself is.  And, when you think about it, that’s just the 2D spatial qualities of it; when you consider that there is nothing on this planet that has lasted as long as the sky has, or will have lasted as long as the sky will, taking any temporal bounds as a “windowframe” of time as it were, then the sky becomes even more daunting.  And, going back to the spatial qualities of it, even if you were to just consider the sky as some sort of 2D dome above the Earth based on its appearance to us, it’s technically just “the whole of the rest of space”, so if you consider it as a 3D domain, then it’s also extends infinitely above you in every direction, too.

There is nothing that can bound, limit, frame, or contain the sky.  Try as you might, you will fail—because the sky is what bounds, limits, frames, and contains all things.

When we talk about things associated with the sky, there are several terms we can use, each of which has a fascinating etymological origin:

  • “sky”, from Proto-Indo-European *(s)kewH- “to cover, to conceal” (cognate with Latin obscurus)
  • “heaven”, from Proto-Germanic *hibin-, perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *kem- “to cover” or from *h₂éḱmō “stone” to refer to the celestial vault generally
  • “celestial”, from Latin caelum “heaven, sky”, with unclear etymological origin, but perhaps from Proto-Indo-European *kaid-slo “bright, clear” or *keh₂i-lom “whole”
  • “天” (the Chinese character for the sky, heaven, or celestial things, including weather or divine entities associated with such realms), is considered as a person with outstretched arms (大) with a level over the head (一), originally representing the round sky (囗) above a person but in addition/alternative to this as an anthropomorphic depiction of heaven as a person with a large head

In three of the examples above, there’s a notion of the sky being something covering us, like a tarp over a pile or a lid on a pot.  The sky is the “lid” of the world we’re familiar with; from our perspective, the sky is what conceals the things above it from us, but by that same token, when seen from above, the sky is what keeps us down here below separated.  In a sense, the sky is the limit of the world, that which contains us and covers us, like a tunic does a body.

But the word “celestial” above is not quite like the other.  It has a different connotation, if you consider the PIE root *keh₂i-lom “whole”, and which would render the word “celestial” indeed related to our word “whole” and thus “holy”.  While the connotations of the English words may well have existed in an earlier time in a different language (emphasis on the word “may”), it’s especially interesting when you consider the Latin word caelum as the opposite of templum “a part” (itself from PIE *temh₁ “to cut”, related to Greek τέμενος).  Sure, this word is generally used to refer to any space dedicated to a deity or to their worship (hence our modern English derivative “temple”), but when it came to the ancient Roman practice of augury, it refers to a demarcated space that an augur would mark out in the sky—a “cut-out part” as it were—in which the augur would observe any omens for interpretation.  The whole sky was not observed, but just a part of it, presumably because the observation of the whole sky was not something possible or feasible to do, especially considering the relatively limited and limiting concerns humans have about things down here.  As a parallel, consider: in ancient Greek thought, one went to a legitimate oracle of the gods for prophecy, but otherwise would piously refrain from trying to determine the events of the future (though one might still seek out advice or guidance regarding it), because only the gods were permitted to know the mind of Zeus and the inner workings of Fate, and even then, such a mind could not be known in full, but only particular thoughts.

There, again, we see a notion of limits—and that makes sense for us as human beings, doesn’t it?  By our very nature, we are finite creatures, and we can’t really deal well with infinity all that well.  I’m reminded of the distinction in Islamic conceptions of infinite time (courtesy of Andrew Chumbley’s Qutub) between azal and abad.  In this context, azal is defined as “eternity a parte ante” or “eternity without a beginning”, and abad as its counterpart of “eternity a parte post” or “eternity without an end”.  As human beings, we naturally have only our own frame of reference to understand abstract concepts, and the most immediate frame of reference for discussing matters of time is the present moment.  In this light, azal is the whole infinity of the past up until this moment, while abad is the whole infinity of time from this moment into the future.  We can look in either direction well enough, but trying to look at both at the same time to consider one infinity unbounded in both directions at once is…challenging.  Sure, we might be able to accept the existence of time as something without beginning and without end, both agenēton and ateleuton, but trying to actually comprehend that is a different matter.  In astrological terms, it’d be like trying to join together the North and South Nodes of the Moon together to see what their conjunction would be like; they are, by definition, opposites of each other.  It’s just the same with azal and abad—and perhaps fittingly so, as they both have conjectured Persian origins meaning “without head (start)” and “without foot (end)”, respectively, just how the North Node is the “head of the dragon” (but without a body, as in Rahu) and how the South Node is the “tail of the dragon” (but without a head, as in Ketu).  It’s only through limitation, because we’re ourselves finite, that we can’t easily approach unlimitedness.

And yet, that very notion of unlimitedness is what so many of us in this mystical stuff seek.  I mean, from the Corpus Hermeticum, consider Hermēs’ vision of Poimandrēs revelation of the “the archetypal form, the preprinciple that exists before a beginning without end” in CH I.7:

After he said this, he looked me in the face for such a long time that I trembled at his appearance. But when he raised his head, I saw in my mind the light of powers beyond number and a boundless cosmos that had come to be. The fire, encompassed by great power and subdued, kept its place fixed. In the vision I had because of the discourse of Poimandrēs, these were my thoughts.

Or again when Nous tells Hermēs how to understand God in CH XI.20:

Thus, unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God; like is understood by like. Make yourself grow to immeasurable immensity, outleap all body, outstrip all time, become eternity and you will understand God. Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. Go higher than every height and lower than every depth. Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb, be young, old, dead, beyond death. And when you have understood all these at once—times, places, things, qualities, quantities—then you can understand God.

In these examples, we have Hermēs confronting (or being told to confront) the very notion of divinity in all its unlimitedness, in all its boundlessness.  In the former example, this is the revelation of Divinity itself; in the latter example, this is the way to be understand it.  It is so unlike anything else we might understand, given how we’re so finite—or, rather, are accustomed to finitude and limits, even if our limits are all within this grand infinity.  After all, the sky stops being a sky once you’re no longer on Earth; then it just becomes space, same as everywhere here.  Once you no longer have sky, you no longer have a separation between world and not-world, inner space and outer space.  It all just becomes…well, it doesn’t become anything, doesn’t it?  It’s rather that the barrier just falls down: it’s a revelation, an uncovering, and in this case, the sky itself is the covering.  At that point, you’re no longer gawking at the limitations that unlimitedness breaks, because there’s no limits there to gauge “limit” or “limitless” anymore.  You just…are, as something with and in and of the totality of everything.

I know this post is a little weird and rambly, but as I said earlier, I occasionally turn to that childlike thought in my childhood of being in awe at how big the sky was.  In considering what it meant and exploring that line of thinking a bit, it reminded me of an important aspect of this mystical stuff that I’ve been exploring more as part of my Hermeticism.  Maybe I haven’t been particularly adept at expressing it, but realizing how used we are to limits in general and realizing how limitlessness can be an aspect of Divinity—and, moreover, how easily it is to behold that limitlessness, and how weird it is to actually experience it—is something I think is a crucial reminder of what it is we’re in this for.  After all, as Nous told Hermēs, we need to get on God’s level in order to understand God.

Remember that little experiment from above, about trying to see outside your field of vision?  Maybe I could make up for the rambling of this post with leaving you a little meditative exercise that builds on that, and which also relates to the imagery of the sky.  As with most meditative exercises, get yourself into a good posture, relax yourself, and regulate your breathing however you normally do so.  Once you’re ready, consider: see yourself sitting as I was, on a school bus seat, looking out the window at the sky.  Take a good look out the window—what do you see?  Trees, cars, people walking their dogs, construction crews?  Always find the sky behind and covering them all, and fix your focus on the sky.  Contemplate how it covers, surrounds, and exceeds anything else you see, wherever else you see it.  Mentally extend how big the sky must be in your mind, not just in one direction but in all directions.  Dwell in that feeling of Bigness, letting it wash away and drown out all else that you saw before.

But, later on, once you’re ready after giving the above a few attempts, consider this instead: see yourself as a single point on Earth, wherever you fancy yourself, and look up at the sky above you.  See the limits of your own perception of the sky: is it a window, or the horizon, or the clouds, or your glasses-frames, or the limits of your field of vision?  Slowly take away each limit you come across to behold more and more of the sky, even unto the whole Earth itself if you have to, even your own body if you have to, so that all you observe is a clear sky in a perfect sphere all around you.  Once you get to that, start removing the very sky itself outwards, removing each layer of the atmosphere from your central vantage point, going outwards and outwards and ever outwards, all to see what continues to lie beyond.  Once you get to the point where you’re observing the entire observable universe all as one thing—well, what then?  Work on your own mental “field of vision”; what are you not perceiving yet, what lies outside your field of imagination (just like how you were trying to look to the right of your own field of vision above)?  Strip away your own perceptive and imaginative limits, strip away the thing even doing the perceiving itself, strip away the very thing stripping the notions of limits—and then dwell therein.