I. PREAMBLE
Xagick is distinct from other wisdom streams. One of its distinguishing features is how it enfolds mental illness. This article aims to provide a general impression of this principle.
Regular readers of these short essays will know that “Xagick” is a name we are using to describe a modified version of occultism. The modification of contemporary occult discourse needs to ensure that it is:
(a) ethical in a strong but post-conventional sense
(b) attuned to the vibe of the emerging planetary, bio-digital & metamodern epoch
(c) deeply connected to pre-historical and shamanic currents
(d) significantly engaged with cognitive science, psychoanalysis, evolutionary theory, art, wisdom studies & post-postmodern cultural theory.
What we have already noticed is that “Xagick” emphasizes transcultural lineages, transrational symbolism, subtle agency, intentionality (“the will”), intra-ontology, aeonics, cultivation of subconscious intelligence, anomalous entities, aesthetics interplay between “light and dark,” sexuality, transformation, imaginal virtuosity, ritual play, uncanniness, the Unknowable, & the teratogenic mystique.
A viable future for magic is also one that honors a special relationship between the capacity for non-ordinary sensemaking & a range of neurodiversities that are conventionally referred to as “mental illness.”
II. IS MAGIC A MALADY?
Mental illness is a notoriously slippery category. It refers to ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving that are unconventional & dysfunctional. This leaves a lot of leeway to describe the unconventional as dysfunctional (and to ignore dysfunctional forms of conventional behavior). Thus the world of psychiatry and psychoanalysis has always haunted a liminal realm. It operates somewhere between the humane task (helping people thrive, access meaning, increase capacity & gain liberating self-knowledge) AND its social enforcement function (marginalize, minimize, and institutionalize pattern-making that deviates from the dominant paradigm).
Psychiatric tomes such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) combine well-researched studies on actual pathologies alongside dubious ideological claims that benefit the pharmaceutical industry and reinforce the power games of the inherited consensus worldview.
Occultism has a slightly different relationship to mental illness. This becomes obvious when you listen to dismissive statements about people who are interested in the occult.
It is said that they are regressing to magical thinking, succumbing to paranoia, getting lost in solipsistic fantasy, talking to non-existent entities, etc. They are crazy. One of the major obstacles in getting occult modalities recognized as legitimate approaches to wisdom development is that they strike many mainstream religions and philosophers as unhinged — needing therapy, maturation, or medication.
The proposal in this essay is that both the occultists and the anti-occultists are correct. There is a deep connection between magic, mental illness & primitive modes of cognition but under the right circumstances, this relationship can be very positive.
Sanity is a symphony of mental illnesses.
(Layman Pascal in “Gurdjieff for a Time Between Worlds.”)
There is a generative middle ground between these two extremes:
(a) “dry” minimalist approaches to inner development (e.g. favoring consciousness itself, sitting for long periods of mental self-examination, discouraging interest in siddhis & subtle entities, suspicion about eating, sleeping, sex, drugs, and dancing)
(b) and drowning in an irresponsible embrace of pre-conventional sensemaking that arrogantly valorizes itself as post-conventional wisdom.
The middle ground is embodied in individuals and lineages that welcome, explore, utilize, and upgrade the basic functional skills and sensemaking styles that underly the various exaggerated “mental illnesses.”
Mild versions of psychopathologies can be explored and integrated to add multidimensional richness, full-spectrum praxis & transformational excitement to the human wisdom project.
Occult spirituality (extending the neurotypical and socially conserved predilections of the archaic shaman caste) enriches basic developmental and communitarian methods. It adds deeper, elemental, ritual-generating, and capacity-cultivating forms of religion by working with — rather than against — our madness.
III. THIBET
The Land of Tibet (formerly spelled with an ‘h’) represents the old mystical culture of the Himalayan mountains. “Tibetan Buddhism” is a common way of referring to the Vajrayana school — which extends basic Buddhist practices to include energy, chakras, tantric sex, dream yoga, healing, rainbow bodies, deity invocations, and dharma-friendly spellcasting. The wig-earing first-wave metamodern theologian Ken Wilber once said, “Zen is essential Buddhism; Vajrayana is complete Buddhism.”
Vajrayana means the Diamond Vehicle. Or Lightning Vessel. Thunderbolt Boat? Brilliant Way? Flashing Path? All good translations. This “expanded Buddhism” is ascribed by legend to the influence of a Silk Road saint named Sri Padma Sam Bhava (a.k.a. Lord Same-Flavor-as-the-Lotus).
Mr. Lotus-Essence was reputedly a tantric master who taught how the correct understanding, feeling, and intentional attention could make any energy workable.
Any mood, imaginal entity, biological impulse, confusion, or social energy — no matter how much it initially appears to deviate from sane, well-behaved, and positive “wisdom” can be converted, upgraded, made more intelligent, and grown into new dharma. (Just as the ethereal lotus flower produces fragrant beauty by up-leveling the pond muck from which it grows).
Sri Padmasambhava often symbolizes a creative historical struggle between the new Indian Buddhism and the ancient Bonpo shamanism of the mountain folk. This fertile integration helped to produce the most elaborate, colorful, artistic, and “magical” version of this wisdom-teaching. An alliance between crazy and domesticated forms of psychotechnology.
The Black Hats (the Kagyu tulkus in distinction from the Yellow Hat sect of Dalai Lamas) have tended to maintain this richer, more adaptive, and wilder approach. Their most famous modern representative was the controversial Buddhist master Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He was well known for attempting to demonstrate that contact with “basic sanity” allows us to artistically convert neurosis into potent wisdom.
Thibet, therefore, may represent the multidimensional regeneration of Dharma from out of those forms of mind and experience that are ordinarily dismissed by conventional wisdom lineages as being unstable, uncouth & madness-adjacent.
IV. SCHIZOTYPALISH
Occult modes of wisdom development make straightforward sense to many Indigenous, free-range, and neo-archaic people. One female Caribbean shaman recently told me that her grandmother characterized their own idiosyncratic spiritual lineage by saying, "We fucks with spirits."
Does that kind of participatory syncretic experimentalism place us at risk of getting sucked into forms of egoism & delusion from which more mainstream, monastic, and monotheist (or post-monotheistic secularist) approaches are safe?
Does serious play with powers, entities, and nonstandard sensemaking lead you on a dark path that is worryingly proximal to both madness and evil? The answer may depend on exactly how proximal you get.
Getting closer to a cliff’s edge, tornado, or stress-induced hallucinatory state can be extremely exhilarating and informative — but a little more might get you killed.
Consider the benefits of being close to schizophrenia. But not too close.
The science of evolutionary psychology used to have a problem with schizophrenia. Evolutionary psychologists study how human mental operations make sense in terms of the neo-Darwinian processes that sculpt the long unfolding of our genetic structure. They have to answer questions like, “Why did evolution preserve the genes for schizophrenia?”
At first, these genes appear to have no value. Schizophrenia frequently causes personal distress, errors in judgment, and unpleasant interpersonal relationships. However, the picture changed slightly when the evolutionary psychologists started to do studies on the extended families of schizophrenics.
These researches indicated higher-than-normal levels of creativity, useful altered perception, increased adaptability, strong capacity for insight, etc. among these relatives. They had milder or more integrated variations of the schizoid genetics.
Evolution was not preserving schizophrenics. That was just a side-effect. It was cultivating these other “schizotypal” individuals. The schizophrenics were just occasional, often maladaptive, exaggerations of this alternative neurotype.
One of the old adages captured by early anthropological studies on “medicine men” and “medicine women” in existing tribal cultures was this phrase: The shaman was a sick person who healed himself and therefore could heal others. Occult forms of spirituality may begin with forms of neuro-behavioral dysregulation and abnormal sensemaking that can be highly useful to the tribe IF it gets stabilized and integrated.
Sigmund Freud did not think much about this possibility. He proposed that primitive “religious figures” were dysfunctional and psychiatrically distressed individuals. Mental patients within superstitious clans. He suspected that sacred objects were established by neurotic fetishists and repetitive ritual play was the result of undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorders
However, one of the early findings from modern anthropological studies on shamans was their relatively high cognitive, social, and linguistic competence within their local cultural context. The priests, medicine people, and witches often exhibited more emotional wisdom, self-control, cultural savvy, and pragmatism than other members of the tribe.
One of the proposals in Xagick is that both of these are true — to some degree. A sensitivity to, and ability to incorporate, partial versions of mental illness can both accelerate cognitive development and render the insights/modes of “madness” into useful skills that can serve the community.
The only difference between myself and a madman is that I am not mad.
- - Salvador Dali
V. A FEW SUGGESTIVE EXAMPLES
Mental disorders can be considered as maladaptive extremes of the Big 5 traits. These traits are degrees of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness & neuroticism which are used widely in contemporary psychology. This fits nicely with our hypothesis that sanity consists of various balances of less extreme versions of the same attributes that stand out in particular mental disorders.
However, to explore our hypothesis that occult forms of wisdom praxis emerge from individuals and lineages that have a richer integration of sensemaking styles sourced from the proto-skills of different mental disorders, let us put aside the Big 5.
Here are some common and classical types of designations that are still widely used (and disputed) for psychopathologies:
An obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can radically inhibit our successful agency in physical and social affairs. It is notoriously difficult to breathe if you must tap 444 times before each inhalation. Yet even many secular folks engage in “knocking on wood,” as if that would secure something important in your life from any future disaster. Likewise, feng shui and other popular arts are oriented toward the participatory manipulation of objects to create spaces that are sacred, empowering, and anxiety-reducing. There are benign pragmatic & post-conventional uses for the root cognitive concerns implicated by OCD.
So the discourse around Xagick should explore the difference between (a) the exaggerated and dysregulating form of this behavior, (b) the milder, socially mediated form of traditional superstitious enactment, and (c) the more fully intentional and energetically-attuned participatory gestures used by transrational occultists.
Fetishism is the mind’s tendency to direct semantic and libidinal energy into a particular object (or person) to stabilize the Chaos of reality. As long as I have my fetish object, I can operate as a sane potent agent of co-creation. Conventional adults are meant to gain the capacity to tolerate uncertainty and therefore outgrow the infantile use of such objects. However, some people are drawn toward a kind of metafetishistic skill-set. They watch the dynamics of fetishism in themselves and others. They learn to create, utilize, and retire “charged objects.”
Paranoia is a condition in which people strongly believe in patterns that fall outside consensus reality. Often dark and disempowering patterns (the gnostic conspiracy is eating babies & trying to destroy intelligibility itself). This module of our mind is problematic when it stands out starkly. In such cases, when most of the people around you strongly disagree, it is likely the extra-patterning is just a mythic description of the shape of your anxiety. However, there are many real patterns beyond the narrow slice of reality that makes it into ordinary socialized perception. If you can decrease the anxiety, and hold these imaginal possibilities in an “as if” position, then you may gain access to real occult (normally hidden) mechanisms.
Neurosis is a kind of blanket term. It is commonly associated with a tendency to get stuck in anxious loops of self-conscious reflection such as those made famous by the character played by Woody Allen. They have negative reactions to their negative reactions. These neurotics are constantly poking and prodding their sense of stress-based identity in relationship to the legitimate uncertainty of life events. However, that becomes a potential set of magical skills if we think about (a) shifting that salient self-sense to other locations, (b) intentionally trying to merge the self-sense with the rest of the organism, (c) getting the feeling of self-reflective identity involved in the co-creation of the intense uncertainties arising to the mind.
Hysteria is a famously misogynist term used to marginalize normal human emotions and certain typical modes of female self-expression. Some theorists of therapy have refined the term to describe a particular mode of engagement in which a person becomes emotionally compulsive, exaggerated, and radically unfair as a method of “probing” other people. The idea is that they cannot trust what lurks within other people and must therefore draw it out through threats, accusations, sexual suggestiveness, etc. The occultist, however, must actively learn to see & feel the hidden functions in themselves and others. Like a hypnotist, we are talking to and listening for aspects of motivation and knowledge not represented by the ordinary personality. A partial or integrated hysteric may develop a good instinct for luring the mythic and subconscious energies into the open.
Certain brains have difficulty exerting intentional self-control over their focusing mechanism in social contexts. We call this Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). These people lock into an intense focus on stimuli that are regarded as distractions by others — or else stimuli that interfere with function adaptation to circumstances. People who are able to stably enfold more of this experience, however, are likely to (a) viscerally experience the need for intentional attention training, (b) encounter liminal patterns, energy, entities, and opportunities that are being obstructed by the habits of the local social context.
Schizophrenia (“split soul”) is a fascinating general category. According to rogue early psychoanalytic theorist W. Reich, the schizophrenic has more than normal access to organic sensitivity and energy flows but experiences these occurring “outside” the self. As if your ideas are coming at you like external perceptions. The shamanic and occult practices of dealing with imaginal entities and undertaking astral journeys can be understood as the domestication of quasi-schizophrenic tendencies.
Multiple-personality disorder appears to be more generalized than psychologists previously assumed. Our ordinary consciousness may be a kind of multiple-personality order (a symphony of selves). The procedures used in forms of therapy called “parts work” start to approximate occult developmental procedures. One searches for fragments of the soul. Contacts archetypes. Deals with inner demons. Prompts the Higher Self for information. And, when this plurality is laid overtop of the external environment, there are ancient animistic practices for processing (upgrading) our psychoenergetic situation by having constructive “interpersonal” exchanges with these projected aspects of the self.
Antisocial personality disorders (such as the ambiguously described psychopath & sociopath) may have an ancient genetic utility. Perhaps they are well-adapted for hunting, war, and other minimally social but high-anxiety circumstances. In many cases, however, studies reveal that these people have underperforming areas of the brain. They demonstrate difficulty coordinating their behavior around social affects which often leads to disastrous impulsive decision-making. Yet the occultist must exhibit a certain degree of indifference to conventional behavior. Risk-taking, relative relaxation under uncertain conditions, inner solitude, and behavioral divergence from ordinary community behavior are necessary. We can imagine this as the integrative utilization of mild sociopathy.
Suicidal ideation is a problematic symptom of many different circumstances and medications. From a developmental perspective, we can suggest that unstable inner and outer paradigms want to “heal” by sacrificing the current operating system in favor of a regressive return to a more primitive (but stable) condition. But there is more here. The preface to Thus Spake Zarathustra says, “I love those who wish to go down; they prepare the way for the ultrahuman.” The occultist must gain some facility in (a) encountering the terrible threshold of nonbeing, and (b) surrendering one’s current identity and life to become available for a transformed condition.
Sadomasochism has a pathological element but also serves many therapeutic and developmental functions. It involves ritual enactments (e.g. cutting oneself, performing bondage-play). It also tasks us with tolerating and learning from taboo-violation and pure intensities. BDSM subcultures provide sophisticated environments of therapy and exploration. Occult subcultures learn to utilize ritual ordeal, pure sensation & erotically charged theatrics.
So-called gender dysphoria can indicate psychological, biological, or neurochemical mix-ups that can be addressed in various ways — including anatomical & social transformation. Yet this need not be looked at exclusively as renormalization. Shamanic lineages often exhibit a high degree of liminality and protean shifting in their gender play and sexual experimentation. And the lineages of Western occultism have made prominent use of the persistent symbol of the hermaphroditic trans-species Baphomet entity to suggest the fluid, post-conventional & coincidentia oppositorum aspects of occult theory and practice.
So these are just a few of the ways that we could begin theorizing the contributions of mild, integrated or upgraded “mental disorders” to the cultivation of occultized wisdom-traditions.
VI. PARALLAX DEMONS
An old episode of the television series LOST features a crashed drug smuggler’s plane discovered in the jungles of a mysterious island. On board the aircraft is a hoard of Virgin Mary figurines. They have heroin stashed inside themselves.
The Marxist metaphor (religion as the opiate of the masses) comes to life in this simple image. The distance between the symbolic entity “religion” and the metaphor “opiates” is decreased. They start to overlap in interesting ways.
Something similar happens with supernatural creatures. Colloquial occultism popularly imagines that a “ghost” has unfinished business. We feel the conceptual distance between the entity & the idea of a relatable situation. Now, flip it. Try thinking about the idea that “unfinished business” is inherently ghostly. We are literally haunted by unresolved situations. The two ideas (ghost, unfinished business) are more entangled. Closer together.
Let’s do the same thing with demons.
Old-timey alcoholic sailors were often bedeviled by the Demon Rum. Addicts and trauma survivors are frequently described as “battling their demons.” Modern people may congratulate themselves on not taking this literally but what happens if we narrow the distance between the concrete situation & metaphor?
What happens inside your brain when you say, “Maybe an addiction really is a demon?”
Maybe the shape of the dysfunction inside a serial killer’s brain is the silhouette of an imaginal-etheric phenomenon that can usefully be regarded as having an independent power of agency?
In this “maybe” we are bringing the two concepts much closer together. Instead of regarding them, in the conventional sense, as two strongly opposed ends of a metaphor, we allow them to get more entangled. As if the two modes of sensemaking were like the Gestalt parallax between “two faces” and “a vase.”
That intensified degree of semantic entanglement has applicability to many aspects of Xagick. In the context of this specific article, it usefully blurs the line between “mental disorder” and “occult framing.”
A. E. Waite’s famous 19th-century occult treatise (referred to as The Lesser Key of Solomon) concerns the Ars Goetia. The art of benevolently enslaving demons.
Wise King Solomon was said to have undertaken the difficult ritual of activating and integrating 72 “demons.” By this method, his already existing wisdom, and his legendary capacity for Divine Communion, were enriched, amplified, complexified & extended through the magical orchestration and upgrade of powers that would otherwise exhibit themselves as demonic influences.
The patterns demonstrated by problematic forms of mental disorder can, in less extreme forms, or with greater efforts of integration, give birth to forms of Dharma that are more internally diverse and broadly applicable.
I’ve never been more convinced we’re on the same page with our digital endeavors as I am after reading this article. I love that you drilled in and took it diagnosis by diagnosis.
I will say I was miffed to see my personal diagnosis left out… representation matters! Hahah
Luckily (heh) I’ve done a ton of writing about Bipolar Disorder type 1 (with full blown mania and paranoia) that reframes it as a wound that a shaman can heal in order to heal the world.
Here’s a reimagining of the bipolar cycle as potentially powerfully helpful:
https://open.substack.com/pub/creekmasons/p/you-belong-with-me?r=1t12wr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
And here’s the sequel in which I discuss the purpose of the paranoia detour that I can sometimes take:
https://open.substack.com/pub/creekmasons/p/paranoias-purpose-please?r=1t12wr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Very aligned in subject matter and intention to what you’re writing.
This other paranoia piece (called Be Not Afraid) almost reads like a (probably too verbose) expansion on your section about paranoia in this article!
https://open.substack.com/pub/creekmasons/p/be-not-afraid?r=1t12wr&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Don’t know why I’m doing so much plugging. Thats not how I usually like to leave comments… I guess I’ve just spent so much time thinking about these exact topics that I don’t know how to summarize in order to react without referencing the distillations of thought process that I’ve already produced.
Thanks for this incredibly validating piece.