Don’t worry, I’m not going to give every post two titles from now on, but I just thought this one was kinda funny. It’s okay if you don’t get it…

Anyway, it seems to be my cross to fire out ideas in such half assed fashion that people easily misunderstand what I’m trying to say. Sometimes they get it fine, but superficially, sometimes they seem not to get it at all. Which perhaps only shows a disparity in underlying epistemic and ontological assumptions.

Now, by the nature of AB I talk about magick a lot, and also by the nature of AB I tend to talk about extremely unconventional forms of magick, if there can be said to be such a thing, and further still I talk about them in large part to people with little or no background in magickal or traditional spiritual practice. So that creates three possible sources of confusion: first I’m talking about magick and people don’t know what I mean when I use terms they also use. Second I talk about forms of magick that have no relation to what other people do or practice in the field of magick, which tends to lead them to thinking what I’m talking about is impossible. And lastly, I run up against assumptions about the world and the things and people in it that preclude the holders of those assumptions from entertaining something contradictory to those concepts, or at least outside the safely defined boundaries of those concepts.

Let’s take my last post for instance: Some people accepted it because it confirmed their worst fears about occultists, others rejected it because it contradicted their understanding of occult practice, and others still failed to see how I was talking about magick at all, as it seemed to be nothing beyond what we normally might think of as the working of the ‘national security state’. What this tells me for starters is that I need to make a better distinction between kinds of occultists, because just calling them good or bad or black or white is not only trite but misleading. So just as I made what seemed to me a useful distinction between Lucifer and Ahriman ( which seems to at last be gaining some traction), I want to make another set of distinctions in the group of occult practicioners.

Keeping in mind that these are fuzzy and overlap to some extent, let’s proceed: The first set I will call the Visionaries. These are the ones who receive the initial paradigm shift, divine revelation, angelic contact, gnosis, or alien abduction. Regardless of how it happens these are the creative geniuses and prophets who supply the impetus for everything that follows. These are the people who usually end up the legendary founder of a religion or tradition. People who try to hew as closely as possible to the spirit or inspiration of the tradition will also be in this model under the category of ‘visionary’. The important thing to remember is the focus is first and foremost on transcendent revelatory experience. Examples would include Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, the Buddha, Hermes Trismegistus, and inspired followers in their footsteps who have the creativity to discriminate while preserving the essential spirit. Relatively recent visionaries would be William Blake, Aliester Crowley, Terrence McKenna, and Phillip K Dick. Those who rest firmly within an established visionary tradition would be the Dalai Lama, Ramana Maharshi, or Mother Teresa. You could think of someone like Marshall McLuhan or Alan Turing as a kind of visionary in the worldly sense as well.

The second category would be the Magi or Technicians. These folks are the ones who do the grunt work of taking the initial impetus of the founder or teacher and unfolding that into a skill set, and using that skill set to achieve results in this world. It’s important to remember that while some ecstatic shaman had a vision of the spirit world, it was the technical innovators who took that visionary knowledge which would in that era have been magick, and invented cave painting, or tool creation, or language, or chemistry, metalworking, divination, healing or whathaveyou. They could well be the same person initially, but chances are they weren’t, and in any event long after the founder is dead the technicians are still tinkering with new magickal applications. Pretty much everyone who thinks of themself as practicing ‘magick’ these days is a technician, with the odd exception looking past the skill set to further visionary experience. Crowley is a good example of a gifted technician who struggled to be a visionary without a lot of success, at least in his life. Peter Carroll and William Burroughs would probably be the last two biggest magickal innovators of the 20th century, laying the groundwork for much of what passes as magick today. Things like NLP and media theory as practiced by Douglas Rushkoff would be excellent examples of technical innovations that occupy that twilight border of the magickal as they still have not been broken down and codified sufficiently to kill the relatively fresh creative spirit.

Our final category, and the ones who tend to cause most of the problems for us today, is the Priesthood. Once the visionary spirit has begun to falter, once technical innovations are sufficiently codified and creativity has migrated elsewhere, the would-be priesthood moves to consolidate control and monopolize knowledge, power, and influence. The name of the game for the priesthood is obfuscation. The reason is, once things have gotten to the level where anyone can use the skills or quote the book, you need to make sure that only the appropriate people can actually learn the skills, or read the book. The interesting thing is, the systems of doing this, what we might call ‘priestcraft’ represent a skill set in and of themselves, subject to technical innovation, even the odd visionary revelation I’m sure. As long as there has been knowledge and resources to monopolize there have been priests refining the means to do so, and cultivating a social structure to educate and indoctrinate the priests.

So when I was talking about how ‘black magicians’ are shepherding the public mind, these are not spiritual visionaries I’m talking about or technical magickal innovators, but the same secretive clique of priests, gatekeepers and obfuscators that have always told people what to think. Their practices are not the practices of the visionary although they may borrow the lingo, their practices are not those of the technician, although they may hire a few, and use the tools they create, and the systems they develop. Their magickal practices are codified languages, obscure rituals, deception, social influence, outright lies and their most powerful magick: the ability to determine the boundaries of acceptable discourse. They have and have always had the power to decide what is speakable truth, and what is taboo, within their sphere.

So when we talk about the black magicians who seem to be running the show, or perhaps calling them archons, or counter initiates, what we’re talking about is a very old and very real branch of the occult, which has been around at least since Sumeria and probably before that. And as usual there will be the denials: that’s not magick, that’s just the powerful keeping people down like they always have… Yeah okay. But how did they do that in the first place, do you think?

Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s ALL magick. It always has been.


7 thoughts on “The Judas Priests or: Making the Law!

  1. Actually, I don’t think you’re hard to understand at all. And I think you have some really excellently clear points and very lucid writing. But I think you tend to weigh it down a little with introductions sometimes. For example, in this essay you could just as easily start on this line and can the warm-ups:

    The first set I will call the Visionaries.

    Maybe throw one sentence or two in front of about how spiritual traditions flow outward from gifted individuals, getting modified for consumption as they reach various groups. And then you got yourself a ball game! Cause your distinction of the three types, just like your analysis of Steiner’s work, is on target and really useful. Just think a little more about the vehicle to get there.


    Zac: sorry if it seemed that I was ignoring your comments about the different kinds of occultists in the last post. I’ve got kind of a ‘jaded’ view of magick; to me, magick is real, it’s everywhere, and we’re all practitioners, constantly interacting with the Source on an instinctive level, just we’ve been raised to think that we’re not, or that we can’t. This brings up a lot of doubts, or the “Psychic Censor” which calls out “BULLSHIT!” when you actually get a result or few from your practice. Magick is slippery: when you think you’ve pinned it down with a rational explanation, it flows around it. How can you hold fifth-dimensional water in a four-dimensional cup?

    For my part, I stopped actively (as opposed to reactively, which I continue instinctively) “casting” or what have you over a year ago (though I still maintain a shrine for focus), after I had my own divine visionary experience which scared the hell out of me. However, lately, I’ve been having incidences of where my unexpressed thoughts and desires become reality without me having to force them to. For example, I’ll be thinking about how hungry I am, and quite unexpectedly my friends who rarely cook will invite me over for dinner. I’d dismiss it as coincidence except that it happens extremely regularly, about once or twice a day that I notice.

    For my part, I think I’m probably more technician than I am prophet, though my vision seems pretty clear. Then again, there’s a lot of room for error in the subjective interpretation: I wonder if there’s a correlation between Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (dealing with measurement of position and velocity of particles) and the spiritual path? That the more energetically you practice, the less likely you can see things clearly; the more clearly you see things, the less likely you can affect them?

    This would TOTALLY explain the Cassandra myth.

  3. Aye Tim good points. I’d have to say I’m not really all that worried about how people interpret the stuff. I tend to think of it as dialouge of sorts and it’s me working to paint a more or less coherent picture out of all the things i post here so I kind of enjoy the conversational warm up aspect. Whether people embrace it ecstaticly, or muddle through without the slightest bit of comprehension just gives me a springboard to the next concept.

    btw i did sort of track down a secondary source on the descartes thing in the comments thread to the hubbard post a little while back there…

  4. and not to worry P-tar. I suppose i was talking more about the folk who read my stuff and comment on it in ways that show they don’t really understand what i said. which is perfectly fine for awhile, but it tends to get out of hand when people think I’m proposing a manichean struggle of good and evil, or that I’m a pagan imperialist like evola, or a self rightious spiritual zealot, or nasty hierarchical fascist cause i like ken wilber… I’m sort of exagerating, but you get the idea.

    ‘stop with the hatin’ start participatin!’

    but like i said in the big picutre it all serves me anyway, so good on em.

    it’d actually be kind of fun if some of the real raving paranoids on rigorous intuition decided i was fronting for occult neo fascists like the ordrer of nine angles and a disinformation agent for ken wilber’s one world government intitative.


  5. Ha, some of those idiots accused me of being a disinformation agent. Fucking morons, I swear. I mean I love Jeff’s stuff… but some of these cats need to get a grip

  6. “Heirarchical fascist.” Jeezus in the Docu-Shred, where the fuck has there been ANY system of participants ANYWHERE where there isn’t a heirarchy spontaneously arising? We sort ourselves out into pecking orders whether we’re humans, chimps, or cichlid fish. Even TREES grow taller than the shrubs underneath: both coexist. Are we to be forbidden to make ANY progress or improvements in the planned Green Utopia, because that would elevate us over others, and promote “heirarchy”? This sort of hyper-Green idealism that doesn’t take the reality of nature into account is destined to bite itself in the ass until it removes its head from that region.

    As to being a disinformation agent or a secret stooge of the Illuminati or whatnot…

    There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia – – called the “Epistle to the Paranoids” that goes:


    2. Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting that ye’ve been left to fight alone.




    Lord Omar hit it DEAD ON.

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