I. Why the seventies?
Over the past few years, I have written extensively on the subject of the 'normie', who I define as the normal, apolitical person, the 'Joe Average', the man in the street, the man who has not been infected by Far Right political views or for that matter any views of the 'extremist' type.
When you become involved in radical politics, you distance yourself, without thinking, from the normie. You regard your own ideas, beliefs, opinions, as being more advanced than his; you do not hold the same opinions as him when it comes to race, immigration, Judaism, Islam, WWII, the 'Holocaust'. At the same time, you look to him as a touchstone of normality, decency, sanity. He was you before you became indoctrinated, and he is still normal society should you ever choose to return to it. When comparing yourself to him, whenever it is that you deign to scrutinise your views at length, you come to realise that after your conversion to extremist politics you have become a free-thinker and perhaps (if you are feeling uncharitable towards yourself) something of a crank. For most of a quarter of a century, I held to that division between myself and the normie: that is, between the 'red-pilled' man and the Joe Average; the man of superior knowledge who was perhaps a little eccentric, and the ordinary man who is apolitical and uninformed but good, decent, proper, and sane.
But this way of thinking, which had become an unconscious habit, was overturned in 2020. Then, as we all know, the world went mad, almost overnight, and plunged into Covidian hell, and the strangest thing is that Joe Average accepted it and still does. In doing so, he showed himself to be more unnatural, more deviate, than any Far Right extremist could ever be.
But the acceptance of the status quo has not turned out well for the normie. Ever after the lockdowns, shutdowns, contact tracing, 'checking-in', QR codes, masking, injections, mandates, and all other procedures of Covidianism ceased, the normie is still a miserable fellow. Australia in 2023 can be summed up as: mortgages, obesity, and the Great Replacement. The three combine to make Joe Average unhealthy and unhappy. As a result, his future looks scary and uncertain. Physically, mentally, and spiritually, he was better off thirty to forty years ago; materially, he was worse off, but that hardly counts.
I miss that old normie, that is, the normie who lived before 2020, and this longing of mine explains why it is that my attention has been increasingly drawn to the past. In 2020, the year of the lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter riots, one poster at Counter-Currents admitted that he and his friends had spent hours watching TV shows such as The X-Files and Dawson's Creek - shows that had aired twenty to thirty years before - because they needed to recover a sense of reassurance, normality, and sanity. I understand the impulse. If we are to delve into the popular culture of three to four decades ago, we encounter a much better normie who differs from the normie that we know today.
I recently saw episodes of two daytime American dramas from one series that aired in 1986 and the other in 1992. The men and women who worked on these shows, the actors, directors, writers, producers, loved their work; they believed in it; they felt that they were contributing something of value. It is this enthusiasm that distinguishes the dramas, which are daytime soaps, of yesterday from those of today. In 2023, four of the old daytime soaps are still running, but the men and women who work on them now do so out of a sense of obligation and perhaps spite. As we know, many of the old American pop culture franchises have been taken over by writers, directors, and producers who dislike them and want to deconstruct them, make them 'woke', more progressive, and so forth, and these efforts have drained the life out of American pop culture. This holds political ramifications, for the appeal of American pop culture has long enhanced America's 'soft power' and transmitted itself to men who would otherwise be foes of everything American: Adolf Hitler adored the novels of cowboy author Karl May, and Boris Yeltsin, the music of Elvis Presley.
In these circumstances, one not only wants to escape the present, one wants to escape all reality. Such a desire is widespread; the normie himself, deep down, does not like the status quo of 2023. He yearns for freedom. And this has a precedent. Fifty years ago, he wanted to get away from reality as far as possible; if we are to judge by the popular culture, we can infer that he wanted to board a UFO and take off to another part of the galaxy or enter a time machine and journey into a distant fantasy past - the past, for example, of J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard.
Such a solution was apolitical, and the decade of the 1970s presents this curious double aspect: one part was apolitical, the other intensely political.
It is the former that concerns me here. How did seventies man seek to escape reality, a reality which, in the view of the mystics of the time, was merely the reflecting of the narrow bounds of everyday consciousness? Many answers can be given, and for the purpose of clarity, here we will be devoting our attention to a single theme, and that is occultism. Mysticism, occultism, the paranormal, the unexplained, all these preoccupied seventies man and served as the easy way out - easy, that is, in comparison to the difficult and closed-off way of radical political change. But that should not be condemned. The seventies man who avoided politics can be forgiven for doing so; his wanting to get away from it all, and his wanting to not take a stand, can be understood once we plainly consider the chaos and tumult of the seventies, a decade that suffered from a surfeit of politics.
Our seventies man locks himself away in an apartment and spend his days stoned on marijuana cigarettes and tabs of LSD, with a stack of books - fantasy novels, the I-Ching, astrology, the chronicles of the spoon-bending magician Uri Geller, and photographic documentaries of UFO and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster - beside his bed. Perhaps, in the evening, our stoned seventies man bestirs himself and walks down to the disco or perhaps the pub - Australia and England, in the seventies, had a splendid pub culture - and he discusses occult and mystical matters with his friends while songs by David Bowie and Elton John blare in the background. Of course, I am here sketching out a caricature, perhaps an idealisation, for seventies man did not really live like that; he lived a humdrum life in an office or factory nine to five. But all the same, his life, as we see it through the prism of pop culture, seems to be a lot more fun than ours.
But one cannot escape politics, and one cannot run from it forever. Politics has a way of catching up with you, and by politics, I mean not the mediocre politics of the statesman of that era (men who are best forgotten and men whose names I will not mention here), but the politics of the statesmen three decades before the 1970s: men such as Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Churchill.
WWII, in the seventies, was a recent memory, and the great men of the war were, in comparison of the politicians of the present age, young. Hitler may have been 90 in 1979 had he lived, but Degrelle, still living, was 73, and Remer, still living, a spry 67. Compare the ages of these two men to the ages of Biden, Trump, Pelosi, Feinstein, McConnell. The parents of boomers in the seventies belonged to the generation that had served in WWII, and this explains why it is that fascism and Nazism seemed relatively fresh in the seventies, and why they formed one of the central preoccupations of the pop culture, as I have recounted in my last post. But fascism did not fly in the seventies and could not fly, perhaps because fascism presupposes neat, well-groomed men with smart uniforms and short hair, and the men of the seventies were anything but. Added to that, Israel, Zionism, Judaism, the Holocaust, had become strong and made themselves everywhere felt. In the seventies, the Holocaust took root. Consuming the mainstream media and entertainment in his typically gullible and unquestioning fashion, the boomer became well and truly convinced that 'Nazi Germany' had gassed six million Jews in giant gas chambers disguised as showers; hence, Israel, the Jewish State, owed its legitimacy to restitution for the terrible crime of the Holocaust, a term that first entered the vocabulary in the seventies.
Revisionists in this period faced an uphill battle and did not score their first successes until the eighties. The salesman for 'Neo-Nazism' was for most of the seventies forced to fight a rearguard action comparable to Germany's anti-partisan campaign in Yugoslavia in WWII; he was compelled to hose down the spreading fire of Holocaustism, Judaism, Zionism. In addition, he had to mount a campaign against the fashion of sideburns, jumpsuits, and long hair.
In his defence, we can say that overall the boomer who sought to escape from the reality of life in the seventies fought with valour and distinction; he may have been sidetracked by Zionism here and there, but as his cultural productions - the TV shows, movies, comic books, novels - prove, he really did escape from planet Earth or at least from the confines of everyday consciousness. He illuminates a path, and it is this path, one in particular that leads towards the supernatural, that I am exploring.
II. The Second Religiousness
To set the scene, I must describe how life in the seventies differed from life in the 2020s. Western man in the seventies lived, and lived well, without the smartphone, the Internet, social media. He read print media and read it profusely; he read novels, magazines, newspapers, and comic books, all of which were sold in the millions. Constantly deluged with reading material that was fresh and new, he seized on the new mania of occult and what was later called New Age literature. The previous decade he had made bestsellers out of The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies, and Vanished Civilizations (1960) by Pauwels and Bergier, and Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1968) by von Däniken. These works may have been ill-founded, poorly researched, unscholarly, speculative, and in the final analysis, nonsensical, but hardly any of that mattered; what did matter was that these books fitted in with the Zeitgeist, which was inclined to the fantastic, the mystical, the paranormal.
As to why the preoccupation existed, various hypotheses have been advanced. Spengler speaks of a Second Religiousness: in the last stages of a Culture or civilisation, the peoples of that Culture, after a long experience with atheism, rationalism, scepticism, materialism, want to return to the innocence of an earlier time and thereby take up once again religious faith; but such a faith is insincere, at least compared to the faith of a thousand years before. The believers in the Second Religiousness are merely pretending, and 4Chan would call them LARPers - Live Action Role Players. Of the Western Culture founded in Europe 1100 years ago, we can say that the Europeans at the point of origin held sincere religious beliefs; they well and truly believed in the Christian doctrine and all the associated religious phenomena of the 'Middle Ages', phenomena which included, among other things, witchcraft and consorting with the devil. Following Spengler, one cannot say the same of the spiritual beliefs of the seventies; they were not sincerely held. They represent the Second Religiousness manifesting itself, according to the inexorable laws discovered by Spengler, at the decline of a Culture. Evola approved of Spengler's hypothesis and mentions it in Ride the Tiger (1961):
On the fringes of structures of barbaric grandeur—rationalism, practical atheism, and materialism — there spring up sporadic forms of spirituality and mysticism, even irruptions from the supersensible, which do not indicate a re-ascent but are symptoms of decay. Their expressions no longer take their stamp from the religion of the origins... The “second religiosity” develops outside them — often even in opposition to them - but also outside the principal and predominant currents of existence, and signifies, in general, a phenomenon of escapism, alienation, and confused compensation that in no way impinges seriously on the reality of a soulless, mechanistic, and purely earthly civilization.
A typically gloomy interpretation by Evola and one contradicted by that of Colin Wilson, the author of the bestseller The Occult (1971), which after publication outsold all of Wilson's previous books put together; to Wilson, the 'occult revival' (as he calls it) represents a furtherance, a step forward, in the self-actualisation of Western man.
III. Occultism and Inflation
We can arrive at a more prosaic explanation for seventies man's taking up the occult and the paranormal, an explanation that does not rest upon a premise of spiritual advance or decline, an explanation that can be found in supply-side economics.
For most of the twentieth century, America had fixed its dollar to gold, and after 1934, the US dollar could buy 1/35 of an ounce of gold, which is to say that gold was worth $USD35/oz. Most countries fixed their currencies to the US dollar and so enjoyed the benefits of the gold standard, and in the post-war years, prosperity reigned. But America began to wind the system called Bretton Woods down in the late sixties, and abolished it altogether in 1971. All at once, inflation broke out all around the world; currencies depreciated in value dramatically; and as could be expected, social, economic, moral, and political unrest ensued. Labour unions went on strike for higher wages, and the Arab oil-producing nations demanded more dollars for a barrel of oil. In such an atmosphere, the old certainties, built up and largely maintained over the course of seven decades, crumbled. The spread of international terrorism was symptomatic. The seventies saw a great deal of political violence, especially in America, and there, hundreds of terrorist bombings took place.
Taxes played a role as well. On paper, taxes were high in the fifties and sixties; the top rate in the US was 70% in 1971, in Australia 65%, and in the UK 83%. But enough loopholes existed for the wealthy capitalist to avoid these high rates, and the working man payed little in tax because of generous rebates and deductions. But by the mid-seventies, these benefits melted away as inflation forced the the working and middle classes into higher and higher tax brackets, brackets that were reserved for the wealthy (the US top rate of 70% applied to anyone earning over $USD100,000 a year).
An astute politician would have campaigned on a platform of cutting taxes and restoring the gold standard; Reagan managed to achieve the first goal of such a platform and failed to achieve the second. Even so, by the time of Reagan, Thatcher, and their imitators elsewhere in the Anglosphere, the seventies had been left behind; the West had entered a new era.
Looking at the culture of the seventies, we can say without a doubt that the economic calamity lay behind the political, social, moral decline of the period, and its coups, revolutions, and wars. We can grasp the scale of the catastrophe if we are look at the crash of the most important stock market in the world - the American. To gauge its worth, divide the Dow Jones Industrial Average by the price of an ounce of gold. If we are to do this, we see that the DJIA was worth 24 ounces in April 1971, a few months before Nixon left gold and abolished Bretton Woods; the DJIA then fell and fell hard, its rapid descent mirroring the crash of 1929; it was worth only 3 ounces by December 1974. By January 1980, we learn that it had reached a low of 1.29 ounces, the lowest it had been since February 1933. That month saw the worst of the bear market of the Great Depression and, in what is no coincidence, Hitler's rise to power.
This method of analysis helps quantify economic decline, as do inflation statistics, unemployment statistics, GDP statistics. But perhaps the statistics do not give the full picture. Working class seventies man, in many respects, was better off than the working class 2020s man; for one, he could buy a house on the cheap. As well as that, he could live in the Anglosphere cities New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, Sydney, Melbourne, when they were primarily white. See this music video from 1975, which was filmed in Melbourne: in it, everyone is an Aussie, everyone is a white - quite unlike in today's Melbourne. The Great Replacement was underway in the Anglosphere and the West as a whole, but its effects did not become noticeable, or rather could no longer be ignored, until the 2000s.
All the same, Westerners in the 1970s wanted to escape - into a world of fantasy, horror, the occult, the supernatural, as is evinced by the explosion of escapist literature. The sword and sorcery genre, although hardly new, took off in this period, as did the fantasy genre, which again was hardly new - the two great innovators Tolkien and Lewis had written their masterworks decades before. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard were dusted off and reissued, imitators followed in their train, and the book shops and paperback stands were deluged with fantastical novels with lurid covers. The sword and sorcery novels featured sinewy, muscled men waving swords, wearing bear-skin loincloths; these men, of grim visages, had long hair billowing in the wind; and when fighting off dangerous monsters, giant apes, orcish warriors, and zombies, the warrior man was accompanied always by a buxom maiden kneeling by his side and wearing the obligatory metal bikini. The sword and sorcery paperback art style was reproduced on the rock album covers of the period, as was the science-fiction art style. Like the fantasy genre, the science-fiction genre flourished in this period, and the covers - depicting vast and mysterious alien landscapes, strange alien beings, and slender attractive females - drew the reader in, and he longed to step through them, as though they were magic doorways into other worlds.
Unfortunately, the sleazy airport novel genre - the sort made famous by Harold Robbins (real name Harold Rubin) - flourished as well, as did another genre linked to it: the horror bestseller. The loosening of restrictions on pornography and gore meant that the horror novelists of the period had free rein to indulge their most base fantasies. William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1971) was sanitised in the 1973 movie adaptation; the Exorcist novel is sordid, filthy, disgusting, life-denying, as are most of the horror bestsellers of the seventies; reading these is reading degenerate art, and after reading them, one comes away with the feeling that they should be burned. John Sutherland, in his Bestsellers: popular fiction of the 1970s (1981), gives a graphic and disturbing account of the plots of these bestsellers, plots that would have made the old American masters of horror Poe and Lovecraft blanch.
This newfound grossness and vileness holds up a mirror to the erosion of certainty. Western man no longer knew what was what; he no longer understood definitions. Again, this traces back to economics, and gold.
A unit of measurement is clearly defined: one foot equals twelve inches. Suppose that this definition was changed frequently over the course of ten years: one foot equals ten inches, now thirteen and three quarters, now twelve and a half, now six. Defining a foot thus would play havoc with, among others, the building industry.
In the seventies, currencies changed their definition almost daily. For nearly forty years, the US dollar had been defined as one thirty-fifth of an ounce of gold: $USD35 bought one ounce. Nixon abolished the gold standard and Bretton Woods, and the US dollar promptly lost its definition. Exchange rates 'floated', the US dollar depreciated; by 1980, at the peak of the inflation, it took $USD850 to buy one ounce of gold.
Keynes says that there is no surer way to debauch the morals of a nation than by debauching its currency. A man borrows a large sum of dollars, then the dollar erodes in value, and then he pays back the loan in dollars that are worth less. In effect, he is cheating his creditor. The same occurs when an employer contracts employees to work for him in dollars when the dollar is worth something; then inflation occurs, and he pays wages in dollars that are worth less, and he cannot be surprised when the workers strike for higher wages. The debauching of the currency, and the consequent theft and fraud, explain why it is that inflation and hyperinflation are forever associated with immorality and crime.
Brian de Palma's movie Scarface (1983) chronicles this sordidness, one that reached its lowest depth at the end of the seventies; the cocaine trafficking boom in Florida in the Jimmy Carter years (1977 to 1980) serves as the perfect metaphor for the decade's dark side.
In a time of shifting sands, people look for certainty - metaphysical certainty. That explains, I think, the appeal of occultism.
IV. Witchcraft and London
In the seventies, occultism was not only a set of beliefs in the metaphysical and the paranormal, it was part of a certain atmosphere, and the essence of that atmosphere can be found in two trashy movies of the period, Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and its sequel The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), both from the Hammer studio and both starring, of course, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. The two films take us to the London of fifty years ago, and without intending to, convey to us London's peculiar charm. The Thames, London bobbies, double-decker buses, Morris Minors - they are all there. And the city possesses a strange tension, an electricity in the air. That emotional atmosphere moves certain of the characters to make forays into the occult. In Dracula A.D.-, it is London youth who don black robes and participate in a witchcraft ceremony; in Satanic Rites, London's social elite.
Those who are familiar with the seventies know of the seventies witchcraft ceremony, as seen in a hundred movies and TV shows. A naked or half-naked young woman lies on an altar in the middle of a pentagram; the onlookers wear monk's robes; the scene is lit by torches. The nudity, and the scarcely-concealed sexual undertones, of these pagan ceremonies excite prurient interest. Certainly, the rituals provide relief from boredom, and indeed, the whole point of them is twofold: one is to remove tedium and monotony, the other is to allow the participants to pierce the barriers that stand between the ordinary everyday world and the world of the supernatural, a world that lies beyond our senses. In their view, these pagans are doing something heroic; they are exploring, in the words of that famous American science-fiction TV show that was canceled a few years before, 'Strange new worlds'.
By that logic, one must salute, then, these occultists, wiccans, dabblers in magic (and what Aleister Crowley called 'sex magick'). But you need not attend candlelit ceremonies in the nude to undertake a journey into the unknown; you can be a reserved gentleman scholar, like Peter Cushing's Van Helsing, and spend your days in a library filled with tomes on the occult, magic, spirits, vampires, witches, religion, and the like (and Van Helsing's library is quite impressive). Scholars in the Van Helsing mold gave us one of the most important works of occult literature of the seventies - Man, Myth, and Magic.
Man, Myth & Magic, dubbed “the most unusual magazine ever published,” was the first mass market encyclopedia of the occult, published in the U.K. and Australia in 112 issues beginning in 1970. A 24-volume hardcover set was released shortly thereafter, and the magazine debuted in the U.S. in 1974, heralded by a particularly memorable television commercial. Edited by occult historian Richard Cavendish (1930-2016) with contributions from an international cadre of academics, Man, Myth & Magic was hugely successful and spawned numerous copycat occult and paranormal encyclopedias well into the 1980s, when the Age of Aquarius gave way to the Satanic Panic.
Like the two Hammer movies, Man, Myth- appeals to the eye; it is visually sumptuous; it boasts much in the way of beautiful artwork; it uses photographs taken in film that gives camera's subjects dark and rich colours.
If we are to immerse ourselves in it, we are to journey across space as well as time; Man, Myth- chronicles all the folklore, superstitions, and religions of countries from England to Papua New Guinea (international travel, by then cheap, easy, and convenient, became a recurring theme in seventies popular culture). But Man, Myth- is intensive as well as extensive; as well as spanning far and wide, it burrows down deep - into our own culture, which is the European and Western. It allows us to fathom the extent to which ritual, magic, faith, pervade Western life, and to which the towering figure of the magician dominates our Culture; examples of the magician are Paracelsus, Cagliostro, John Dee, St Germain, Éliphas Lévi, Aleister Crowley, and above all, Faust; it should be noted that Spengler names our Culture after Faust. A charlatan and a scoundrel (and most likely a pederast), Faust nonetheless was gifted with some degree of magical power or at least charismatic and spell-binding charm; he most certainly possessed a complement of the Will to Power that Spengler identifies as uniquely Western. In his peculiarities and in the progress of his career (which was plagued by bad luck), Faust creates the model for Western magicians.
When we are to consider the lives of these magicians, along with those of the famous quacks, mediums, and seers Swedenborg, Blavatsky, Mesmer, and Daniel Douglas Home - whose miraculous feats were never convincingly disproved - we are plunged into a world of colour and movement that is so much more intriguing than our own. We can understand, at once, how Man, Myth-, which gave vivid accounts of the lives of these men and women, attracted and compelled.
V. Rationalism and Zionism
Skeptics, atheists, rationalists, materialists, may have balked at the seventies obsession with the paranormal; they attempted to debunk and discredit the occult divines of the past, and are still attempting to this day - see the Wiki entry on Home - but amusingly enough, they lacked the courage to debunk and discredit other feats of legerdemain, the most important of which is the greatest miracle of the twentieth century: the German gassing of one million Jews in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and the disposal of one million corpses without a trace.
The occultist and the rationalist stand opposed because of the difference in the cultural and religious makeup of their world views. The dry and threadbare rationalist world view does not appeal; the seventies reader of Man, Myth- would respond to the rationalist debunking (even if it had been thorough and comprehensive, which it was not) with the retort, 'Fantasy my ideas may be, but my fantasy is better than your reality'. And they would be right to feel contempt. I think a divergence exists here that is fundamentally racial, or at least owing in its origin to the clash between the Cultures. Despite the inflection of Eastern elements, the ideology of Steiner, Cayce, Blavatsky, Kardec is a European product, for better or worse; whereas the ideology of the Holocaust, with its six million immolated in giant ovens, its triumphant resurrection of murdered Jews, its return of the Jewish State of Israel to the Jewish people, a return granted to them by Jahweh - all of it is thoroughly Zionist and Jewish. The rationalists felt brave enough to take up cudgels against the likes of Uri Geller, but not Geller's homeland, Israel. Occultism is a soft target and an easy kill, Zionism is not.
IV. National Socialism, Normies, and the Occult
On the opposite side of rationalism stands blind credulity. We must ask, when contemplating any of the hundreds, if not thousands, of titles published in the seventies on the paranormal, if we are to believe every word - on Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, UFOs, telepathy, astrology, psychokinesis, numerology, and the rest. Colin Wilson confidently announces, in one of his many works on the paranormal, that a few miles from your home a poltergeist haunting is taking place. He gives many well-documented cases of poltergeist hauntings, so well-documented that they serve to convince. But oddly enough, all of these hauntings stopped by the time of the eighties, and twenty years later, all incidents of the paranormal seem to have ceased. Sightings of UFOs, so ubiquitous in the fifties, rarely if ever occur in the smartphone age; and the same holds true for sightings of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.
Someone of a rationalist bent would find in this fact grounds for skepticism. But poltergeists are spirits, and so are - according to one elaborate occult theory - UFOs and the Loch Ness monster; UFOs are not aliens in flying saucers, and the Loch Ness Monster is not a giant reptile living in a lake in Scotland; both are, according to the theory, denizens of the spiritual world who have escaped into the material. Taking this to be true for the sake of argument, we can surmise that the reason why paranormal phenomena died off some time shortly after the start of the 21st century is this: by the turn of the century, the spirits had left the Earth.
That we live in such a bleak and bare landscape, one denuded of spiritual life, should not prevent by all rights our escape, our retreat into the past, our immersion in the 'occult revival' of fifty years ago. The desire is still there. The grotesque spectacle of Biden as a president can only induce gloom in any American contemplating it, and five decades ago, the spectacle of Nixon, Ford, and Carter induced a similar feeling; and who can blame the American then and now who wants to free himself from the present?
One obstacle does the bar the way, however, and that is our politics; we belong to the movement, a movement which is nationalist, or Far Right, or white nationalist, or Neo-Nazi, or whatever you want to call it, and however we define them, our political convictions at first sight would stop us from seeking the path to spiritual freedom. For the truth of the matter is that occultism is infested with 'normies'. If one digs deep, one will find that Blavatsky, Steiner, and Kardec held opinions on subjects as race that were close to our own; but these opinions only mirrored those of their contemporaries, and in any case, have disappeared from today's Theosophy, Anthoposophy, and Spiritism, in much the same way that Luther's opinions on the Jews were expunged from the Lutheranism that came long after his death.
Some of the entries in Man, Myth- give an insight into the views of occult scholars on the subjects of racialism and National Socialism. On reading these, we are surprised to learn that these scholars are generally as not as 'pozzed' as we would assume. The entry on National Socialism is sober and judicious, and not given to flights of fancy, that is, to speculations to the effect that the National Socialists were occultists, Satanists, black magicians and the like. The entry details the rather sudden and brutal suppression of occultists in Germany after Hitler's coming to power; among the victims of the suppression was, ironically enough, the 'racial occultist and founder of the Ariosophical movement', Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, ironic because Lanz' ideas anticipated those of the National Socialists in many ways.
After Rudolf Hess' flight to Scotland in May 1941, another round of suppression ensued:
Time was required to plan the 'Aktion Hess', which led to the arrest on 9 June 1941 of hundreds of occultists, with the astrologers at the top of the list... The 'Aktion Hess' was organised on a nation-wide basis and practically all the arrests were made early on 9 June 1941. The victims included many Party members. Apart from the astrologers the Gestapo arrested a wide range of occultists: alleged clairvoyants, radiesthetic (pendulum) practioners, faith healders and Nature cure pundists, Ariosophists of the Lanz von Liebenfels school, members of the Christian Community (an Anthroposophical sect), antisemite Ariosophical Cabalists, and so on.
In the majority of cases those arrested were released within a few days or weeks, although were were a few important exceptions. Before being set free all were required to sign a declaration that they would neither practise astrology or any other occult science, nor discuss the subject with anyone. All publishers' and booksellers' stocks of astrological and occult literature were seized and many private collections were confiscated. Any public identification with the occult now became extremely dangerous.
The entry 'Neo-Pagan German Cults' reads much the same way; occultists and pagan are portrayed as victims of the National Socialists, a class of victims who are decent people persecuted for their unusual beliefs; but there is little in the way of animosity towards the National Socialists. The tone becomes different in the entry 'New Templars', which gives an account of 'Viennese occultist, racial theorist and founder of the Order of New Templars, Dr Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels'. Here the author stoops to condemn.
At least theoretically, Lanz anticipated all or most of the Nazis' repressive racial measures, such as the eradication of 'unsatisfactory' racial types or groups by castration or sterilisation, starvation, forced labour and other means. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that he would have countenanced the 'gas chamber' solution if he had been in a position to implement it. Lanz and his followers belonged to the absolutely lunatic fringe sector of the pre-Nazi Pan Germanic movement'.
The author of this entry mentions the 'g' word - genocide; this is a term coined by the Jewish anti-Nazi activist Rafael Lemkin, and one that is suspect, not only because of its provenance but because of its logic - see The man who invented "genocide" : the public career and consequences of Raphael Lemkin (1984) by James Joseph Martin.
Having said this, the exception proves the rule. I call Man, Myth- as a witness in my case that by and large the occult movement of the seventies, at least, was blissfully unaware of the larger political currents of the times. The attitudes of this movement, which was largely apolitical, contrast against those of the politically engaged.
And in the politics of the time, Jews and Middle Easterners starred. The man engaged in politics could not avoid Israelism, Zionism, Judaism, Holocaustism - all one and the same thing - for the world's attention seemed inordinately focused on Israel and the Middle East more so than in preceding decades, and the blame can be laid at the door of the spectacle of Palestinian terrorism (which had quickly became a media spectacle), the 1973 October War, the oil crisis, the Lebanon Civil War, and the toppling of the Shah in Iran. Reacting to it all in a manner that is completely understandable, the occultist's response to it was simple: shut it out and pretend that it did not exist. Switch off the evening news; that way, one does not have to look at the ugly faces of Golda Meir and Yasser Arafat.
The question of how long this sidestepping of political realities can be sustained must be addressed later; for now, we must ask this. We know that the occultist wants to embark on a voyage to the unknown realms of consciousness, to the astral plane, perhaps; he wants to transcend the limitations of the everyday. He wants to escape. But who or what is he escaping?
With the benefit of hindsight - fifty years worth of it - we see that our mystical sensitive wants to escape the normie. The normie revealed his destructive and irrational character in the Covidian period of 2020 to 2022, and we can assume that this character was more or less the same in 1972 as it was in 2022. But at first sight, this seems debatable. The normie of the 1970s would not have acceded to lockdowns, testing,contact tracing, masking, social distancing, mandates; after all, he scarcely noticed an Asian flu epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands in the late seventies. We can guess that the normie of the 1970s was more decent, healthy and sane than the normie of the 2020s - but was he? The pessimist says no; the only reason why the political, media, and science establishment in the seventies could not pull off something like Covidianism was that the time was not ripe, the conditions were not there, and other problems were pressing. Assuming that the pessimist is correct, we can understand the occult scholar's bleak assessment of human nature - and his renouncing the world and his burying himself in volumes on the witchcraft of the Middle Ages.
Now, fifty years after, I understand him. Those who were unaffected by the Covidian madness of the early 2020s and were repelled by it, realised within the first months of 2020, and with a sensation of dawning horror, that the normie populace had gone mad, stark staring mad. The sane ones, those still possessed of natural human impulses, experienced an instinctual desire to flee. Perhaps the flight would be to the rural and regional areas, the areas outside of the cities, cities that had become eerie and deserted as the millions of inhabitants complied with stay-at-home edicts and placed themselves under voluntary house arrest. In those years I myself fantasised every night before going to sleep about moving to some shack in the countryside, perhaps in the woods - somewhere where the masking, testing, and injecting freaks could not find me.
But one has to effect a mental removal as well as a physical. And the only means of doing that is to distance oneself from the normie media. In order to isolate oneself completely, one would need to relocate to a country shack and cut oneself off, for perhaps at least six to twelve months, from radio, TV, newspapers, the Internet. But perhaps isolating oneself from the modern world is impossible: even if our hypothetical country shack-dweller was reasonably self-sufficient, even if he grew most of his own vegetables, he would still need to descend periodically into town for supplies - and there he would encounter, if in the year 2021, people wearing masks, and newspaper headlines giving the latest lockdown updates. In 2021, the only real means of emancipating oneself completely would be to relocate to an abandoned oil rig, or an Antarctic base, or the Moon.
The views, opinions, desires, aspirations, fears, prejudices, of the normies - many of these of the product of manipulation by the political, media, and scientific establishment - have a way of bleeding through whatever barriers one may put up; one may erect formidable defences against normie ideas, but in the end one is only human - one has to descend from one's mountain shack at some point and commune with one's fellow human beings. Even the the most grizzled and ornery nationalist and racialist must concede this; he cannot live as a complete hermit. Now, seeing how tough it is for the hard-bitten Far Rightist, imagine how tough it is for the 'sensitive plant' (to paraphrase Shelley), that is, the occultist; for him attaining inner freedom becomes difficult work indeed.
Given this, it becomes understandable how by the 1980s the devotee of New Age would take on board, perhaps inevitably, Judaism, Zionism, and Holocaustism.
V. Markides and the Magus
Study reveals unexpected correspondences between occultism and Far Right extremism. The use of the word normie, which first begins in the 2010s, implies an acknowledgment of a distinction between esoteric and exoteric spheres of knowledge, the same distinction that exists in occultism. The most significant Alt-Right and 4Chan ideas of the 2010s were inspired by The Matrix (1999), a movie that famously divides humanity into two classes: those who have swallowed the 'blue pill' and those who have swallowed the 'red pill'. Again, the division is nothing new; it is taken from one in the Western esoteric tradition, a division between those who have imbibed the secret knowledge and those who have not. The latter class, in 4Chan parlance, are christened 'normies'.
But the nationalist and the paranormalist must soon part ways even if they do agree that they both possess esoteric knowledge; for the paranormal believer, seeing that this is the 21st century, more likely than not is in 4Chan parlance 'pozzed', that is, infected with left-liberal ideology (in the spirit of irony, the word was appropriated from homosexual slang; it is short for 'HIV positive').
After the seventies, occultism changed its name and became New Age, and classic works appeared in the new genre, one of them being The Magus of Strovolos: The Extraordinary World of a Spiritual Healer (1985) by American academic Kyriacos C. Markides. The book chronicles Markides' journey to Cyprus in the seventies and his encounter with a remarkable man, Spyros Sathi, known in Cyprus as Daskalos (a Greek word for teacher). Daskalos routinely makes extraordinary claims, one of them being that he is the reincarnation of John the Evangelist, and Markides becomes convinced of their veracity. He decides to study under Daskalos, and in doing so he treads the same path as P.D. Ouspensky and Carlos Castaneda, two other writers who succumbed to the charm of charismatic gurus.
Markides’ remarkable book The Magus of Strovolos makes it clear that Daskalos is a magus in the most precise sense of the word. Daskalos, who lives in Nicosia, is widely known among Cypriots as a healer, and it was to learn more about his healing powers that Markides visited him in 1978. It soon became apparent that Daskalos is far more than a healer: that as a teacher, he deserves to be classified with Steiner and Gurdjieff. When Markides visited him Daskalos looked like what he was — a tall, mild civil servant in his mid-sixties. He explained to Markides that most of his healing was carried out in an ‘out-of-the-body’ state (which he calls exomatosis) with the aid of invisible helpers. Markides talked to a peasant whom Daskalos had just cured of a long-standing spinal injury and received from Daskalos permission to study him with the aim of writing a book about his powers. [Colin Wilson, Beyond The Occult: Twenty Years Research into the Paranormal (1988)]
Like Castaneda and Ouspensky, Markides expounds the complex philosophical system of his mentor, one which is so impressive that an open-minded reader, like Markides, is won over to it and embraces it completely. Daskalos' ideas resemble Rudolf Steiner's, but as transmitted through the amanuensis Markides, they are more palatable, for the simple reason that Markides could write well and Steiner could not. Because of Markides' skill, Markides explains Daskalos' ideas better than Daskalos himself - Daskalos wrote at least one book, which is unreadable - and he makes Daskalos' anecdotes, which if told by anyone else would strain credulity, entirely plausible. Such is the spell that Markides, by dint of his literary talent, weaves.
What brings one back to earth and returns one to reality - like a wandering astral body that is suddenly snapped back into a comatose physical body - is Markides tipping his hand and revealing his sheer pozzedness.
Markides gives an account of hauntings of Jewish girls by evil Nazi ghosts, and no, I am not making this up. Here is Colin Wilson again:
One of Markides’ first experiences of these powers was strikingly dramatic. A friend asked if Daskalos could see three Jewish women, two of whom had just come from Israel. The daughter of one of the women was suffering severe psychological problems. Daskalos lost no time in establishing his credentials as a psychic: he told the daughter that she was wearing a star of David over her heart, which was correct. The girl — who was called Hadas — then explained the problem: she was possessed by demons who would not allow her to rest. Her aunt declared this was sheer imagination. But after asking the girl to close her eyes and studying her for some time, Daskalos declared that she was possessed by the spirits of two Nazis, husband and wife, who had died in the bombardment of Hamburg and who hated Jews. They had already sent four other Jewish women into asylums and had succeeded in taking possession of the girl ‘when their vibrations and yours were on the same frequency’.
Daskalos lit a candle and proceeded to perform a cabbalistic ritual using a six-pointed star and a white eagle. Markides noticed that when Daskalos concentrated on the candle flame it behaved in a peculiar way, becoming elongated and producing black smoke, then shrinking and guttering. As soon as Daskalos stopped staring at the flame — which was several feet away — it became still. The ritual went on for a long time, with Daskalos sternly addressing the flame. Finally, with an expression of relief, Daskalos told them that the spirits had been driven out and could no longer do anyone any harm. As always, he refused to accept money for his services.
A week later Markides talked to the girl, who had ceased to hear voices after the ritual of exorcism. She told him how the trouble had started after a quarrel with her boyfriend: as she lay in bed something seemed to enter her head. She became ill and nervous and vomited a great deal. A rabbi told her that on the fortieth day she would vomit more than usual, and that the problem would then go away. This proved to be true. But after a later quarrel with another boyfriend she felt something enter her stomach. After this she began to hear voices that told her they would torture her and make her go mad. Every night they tried to make her commit suicide. Then, through her aunt who lived in Cyprus, she had heard of Daskalos, who had now cured her.
Up to this chapter, I was prepared to give Markides the benefit of doubt; I would listen with perfect equanimity to stories of astral projection, karma, past lives, reincarnation, black magic, spiritual healing, esoteric Christianity, angels, demons, and the rest; but the gratuitous inserting of 'The Nazis' at this juncture led me to a breaking point. Markides' anecdote goes to show that 'cucks' (in AltRight parlance) and normies infest even the realm of the paranormal. We cannot escape them; presumably, they shall follow us to the astral plane (or what Daskalos calls the 'psycho-noetic plane') after our deaths.
VI. The Permanent and the Present
All in all, one can, despite the evidence to the contrary above, get much in the way of deep wisdom from a system such as Daskalos', and the good news is that we can even apply that wisdom to the present political situation.
Sadly, Markides disagrees. He wrote two sequels to The Magus-, both of which are worth reading, but after these he ended up disillusioned with the teachings of his guru. He then turned towards Greek Orthodox Christianity, a Christianity more rooted than Daskalos' in his Greek cultural and national heritage.
Moving back to The Magus-, we find a useful distinction between the two selves that make up Man: one self pointing to the outside of Man, towards higher ideals, the Absolute, God; the other pointing towards the inside, towards Man's dreams, hopes, fears, aspirations, regrets, desires. The objective side contains, among many other things, the history of his race; and the subjective, the history of himself.
Colin Wilson writes, in Beyond the Occult:
Daskalos explained the essence of the problem when one of his followers asked him about the meaning of personality. He explained that there are two personalities: the permanent personality and the present personality. The present personality is ‘who I think I am at this moment’. The permanent personality is ‘that part of ourselves upon which the incarnational experiences are recorded and are transferred from one incarnation to the next’:
Let us assume [Daskalos said] that the permanent personality is a large circle. Imagine another circle outside without a periphery. We call that the soul, which is within God, within infinity and boundlessness ... . There is also a small circle inside the other two which I call the present self-conscious personality. All three circles have the same centre... . The centre of the present and permanent personality, as well as the self-conscious soul, is the same.
The more the present self-conscious personality opens up as a circle, the more the permanent personality penetrates into the present personality. The higher you evolve on the spiritual path, the greater the influence and control of the inner self over the present personality. We habitually say, for example, that this man has conscience whereas another one does not. In reality there is no human being who does not have a centre.
So how, Wilson asks, can a man escape the bounds of his 'present personality'?
Daskalos would say that he must keep on maturing until he grasps the paradoxical fact that he is not his present personality. But this answer is bound to be disappointing for the rest of us, who feel that we would like some more specific recommendation. The alternative — trying to dive head first into mystical experience like Merrell-Wolff — is hardly more satisfying since as Merrell-Wolff himself admits, the experience evaporates and refuses to return when we want it.
Common sense says that in order to appreciate absolute ideals, the Infinite, the Absolute, one must look outside of oneself, one's narrow preoccupations, one's subjectivity; but the paradox is that such an action, worthy as it may be, can lead one away from high ideals.
Consider the history of the past three years. The political establishments of China and America became captured by Covidianism and determined to make everyone's life as miserable as possible, and in 2023, even though the mandates have ended for the most part, the misery continues; people are still getting sick, and even dying, as a result of the injections, and one of the lingering side effects of the lockdowns is the worst inflation in forty years.
The inflation of the 2020s differs from that of the 1970s in that it was not brought about by depreciating currencies but by 'supply-chain difficulties', that is, by what happens when you prevent by lockdowns millions of people producing their goods and trading them with another. Because of the smoke-screen erected by the media, we are prevented from seeing this instance of cause and effect, and indeed we are now meant to forget that Covidianism ever happened. But the media and the political establishment cannot conceal the truth that Australia in the 2020s remains a grim place.
Now, when one contemplating the world today, and doing so from the side of 'objectivity', one cannot ignore all the recent privations, disappointments, failures, catastrophes - all the shortcomings of life. And if your neighbour's life showed a deficit in the past three years, so did yours. You do not live in isolation from your fellows. Covidianism proved that; the phenomenon of Covidianism was not confined to the Western world and China; countries as disparate as the Philippines and Russia both imposed, through unilateral use of force, the brutal practices of Covidianism upon their citizenry.
Thoughts about the Covidian years, which spanned from 2020 to 2022, induce a negative reaction; no-one can look back at those years without regret and sorrow, and one feels the same when one today sees the grim survivals of that era - Biden, Trudeau, Putin, and even mediocre regional politicians such as Gretchen Whitmer and Daniel Andrews. All of it serves to drive one's consciousness back into the 'present personality', which these days threatens to become a swamp from which the 'permanent personality' must be freed.
So the best advice is: ignore these 'objective events', even though others may claim that they are serious, important, and worthy of notice; and read Man, Myth, and Magic.
