DO YOU BELIEVE IN XAGICK?
De Novus Occulta Philosophia
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Thus begins a new Layman Pascal Substack devoted to Xagick. The post you are currently reading will introduce the series, define “Xagick,” and outline some of the nourishing & suggestive content that ye dedicated subscribers may expecteth…
I. INTRODUCTION
Hello.
This new substack (which will soon be migrating across the digital veil into paid subscription space) will consist of notes and drafts for a forthcoming book on my general principles, reformulations, hybridizations, practices & critiques of the hermetic, occult, and magical arts — considering these collectively as an important subset of the contemporary transdisciplinary wisdom-cultivation movement. The “occult,” taken broadly, represents a significantly undertheorized piece of the general human wisdom project as well as an area of play, exploration, and personal necessity for some of the most interesting people.
The material in these articles will align closely with my work in metamodern spirituality, integrative postmetaphysical religion & metashamanics. It will also overlap with perspectives presented in the recent Parallax Academy course (The Teratogenic Mystique w/ Scout Wiley) as well as other practices and considerations from the full repertoire of the Serious Playground — which is the emergent name applied to my online intersubjective coursework and ritual offerings.
My goal with this series is not only to provide the benefits of my insights, instincts & experiments in these areas but also to cross-fertilize the discourse of occultism with four other key inquiries:
(i) a deeper, non-dogmatic and embodied nonduality adapted to the current philosophical world-historical moment
(ii) new modes of cognitive science & non-reductive reductive naturalism such as those associated with John Vervaeke, Gregg Henriques, Roy Bhaskar, etc.
(iii) the ethos of the post-postmodern or “metamodern” cultural spirit
(iv) analytic psycholinguistic concepts from the cryptic side of philosophy such as Lacan, Hegel, Whitehead, Bhaskar, Zizek, Badiou, Wilber, Gebser, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Reich, Jung, Vervaeke, Colin Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson, Pico di Mirandella, Greg Kaminsky, Timothy Leary, Gurdjieff, Alexander Bard, McKenna, Taleb, Morton, Steiner, Pascal Beverly Randolph, William Burroughs, Austin Osman Spare, Paracelsus, Heraclitus, etc.
Perhaps even some women!
Stylistically, I intend to be sly, playful, sincerely ironic & freely blending story, symbolism, theory & autobiography (as above, so below). We wish to partly bypass the normal information intake habits of the socialized mind. I will also be using these posts themselves as covertly-laden enactments or “spells” in which the readers will become participants.
And each post (after this one) will feature a special practice for skill-building in the appropriate thematic subtopic. Thus the Substack series will function as something between and beyond a book, newsletter, course, community & egregrore.
Now, what the heck is Xagick?
II. WHAT IS XAGICK?
In the early giddy days of the modernist (20th) century, a notorious secret agent, occultist & countercultural pop star — Mr. Aleister Crowley, esq. —decided to revert to the old English spelling of magick. He added a ‘k’.
‘K’ is a significant letter. It is the 11th character in the modern English alphabet and easily among my top 26 favorites (sic). The brilliant, traumatized & narcissistic Crowley altered the spelling for two reasons:
Firstly, he felt compelled to acknowledge that a new phase of esoteric cultural history was beginning. According to the “revelations” that appeared in his own ritual trancework, magic itself was different. The optimal form of participatory ritual was shifting. He felt the stirrings of a new planetary epoch in which tantric, integrative & perspectival use of the etheric, imaginal and subconscious powers of human beings would replace the suppressive martyr-and-control cultures of the Axial religionss. Where they gave pride of place to blood sacrifice, heredity hierarchy, impersonal enlightenment — and the aggressive assertion of centralized social symbols and mass affects — we might now be looking to a world of fractal decentralization, male/female merger, ongoing creativity, mycelial networks, the integration of negative affects & self-cultivating hedonic intelligence.
Was he right? Not quite right? It an open question.
The second thing that Crowley thought he was doing was to diferentiate actual occult magick (“the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will") from mere entertainment, trickery & stage magic.
Insofar as we are in a digital-planetary Age of the Metacrisis we must perforce agree that some version of a “new style” of human esoteric praxis and theory is needed. I will argue that it must be both futuristic and archaic in its attempt to supersede the fears and hopes of traditional occultism.
However, I am not wholly convinced that we need to strongly differentiate ourselves from stage magicians. The performative and intersubjective invocation of wonder is not the enemy of profound imaginal/etheric explorations. In fact, the organic innocence of joy and mystery that is frequently exploited in entertainment may be an essential part of the way that we evaluate a healthy occult pathway that can be distinguished from a modern extractive and tactical manipulative of the world through “will.”
So for the sake of continuity, I have kept the ‘k’ but for the sake of discontinuity, I have replaced the ‘m’ with an X.
Xagick.
I think it looks quite presentable. And it is fun to say. X represents a precisely unknown variable. It also sounds a bit like the sharp sword of discernment being drawn forth from its metal scabbard. Long before TV’s “The X-files,” we understood that this little sign of the cross invites courageous, fun & clear thinking about the anomalous.
Here is the song “I Believe It’s Magic!” from the 1980s comedy classic Ghostbusters. This music initiates the famous montage sequence in which an open portal allows entities, etheric energies & subconscious awakenings to interpenetrate the otherwise disenchanted environment of contemporary civilization.
Please listen as though the chorus were singing: “Do you believe in Xagick?”
Xagick is the focused use of somatic and affective stimulation, intentionality & semantic suggestiveness to responsively organize emergent, contextualized patterns of human experiential unfolding into “enchanting” zones of transjectivity and synchronicity.
Through adaptation to those zones, sapient beings can cultivate a new indigeneity and organic hierophantic agency relative to subconscious, unknown and/or unintelligible forms of causality and communication.
These procedures operate via particular neurophysiological states. They also involve a sensitized retro-teleological reconsolidation of our multiple intelligences in the present moment such that we orient toward hyper-futures that are interpreted as already implicit within the indefinite imaginal extension of our currently expressed gestures of meaningfulness.
What?
Exactly.
For the sake of simplicity, let us say that Xagick is a participatory postmetaphysical approach to using neurosomatic energy flows, desire clarification & semantic excess to enter into a mode of being-in-the-world that is characterized by two-way agentic interaction with meaningful coincidences.
III. FORTHCOMING
Here are some examples of upcoming chapters for these Substadk series drawn from notes that I have already composed:
Participatory Liminality: The Need to be Ontologically Unsettled in Ritual Spaces
Teratogenics: The Initiatory Role of the Monstrous in Re-Enchantment
Third Spaces: Transjectivity in the Mode of “Entity” & “Realm”
The Superstition of Langauge: Lacan, Semantic Excess & Constructive Verbal Taboo Violations
Subtle Energetics: Getting Beyond Imagination, Bioelectricity & Metaphor
Neither Religion or Human Development: Occultism as a Unique Branch of Psychotechnology
The Extended Pilgrim’s Progress: Psychotechnology Principles for Journeying & Pilgrimage
Imaginal Virtuosity: Active vs Forced Imagination, Participatory Cosmologies & Salvador Dali’s Paranoiac-Critical Method
The Use & Abuse of Transgression: Emancipation vs. Diminishing Returns
Trancework: The Transparent Induction of Repeated Concentration on Non-specific Significances as the Primary Magical and Normative Archaic Mode of Consciousness
Doppelganger: The Use of Doubles, Replacements & Duplicative Salience-Amplifiers
A Vibe-Based Taxonomy of Anomalous Trans-Categoreal “Entities”
The Role of the Superego in Acts of Consecration
Sidereal Affect: Eugene Gendlin’s “Focusing” & Lateral Resonance Chains in Ceremonial Performance
The Lived Logics of Sacrifice I: The Penitent Ordeal
The Lived Logics of Sacrifice II: The Presumption of Offerings
The Lived Logics of Sacrifice III: The Significance of Misplacement
Non-Stupid Numerology
The Alter of Altarity
The Unintelligible is a Language
Implicit Occultism: The Mysteries of the Ancient Egyptians were Mysterious to the Ancient Egyptians
Whispers of the Hill-Folk: The Implied Occult Principles of Gobekli Tepe & other Pre-Agricultural High Cultures.
L’intentionalisme: Rehabilitating, Revalorizing & Cultivating “the Will”
Why the Occult is Marginalized in Emergent Wisdom Communities
Drumming w/ Otters: Principles of “Non-Cognitive” Metacognition Praxis
Subconscious Selfhood as the Primary Evolutionary Agent
The Taste of Portal-Events: Bardo Realms, Permeability Sites & the Organic Machinery of Inter-Evocative Objects
Schism & Merge: A History of the Occult Before, During & After Civilization
Tulpamancy: The Evocation of Entities
Indefinite Extension: Synchronicity, Peak Experiences & Nietzsche’s “Amor Fati”
The Rosy Cross: Setting the Stage for Sex Magick
The (at least) Metaphor of the Magical Body
How to Create a Secret Occult Society
The Cabin in the Woods: Clive Barker, Stephen King & Horror Film as Ritual Schematics
The Unbound Semiotic: Becoming Instinctive with Sigils
Mythocolloquialism I: Evoking the Pantheons Hidden in Plain Sight
Mythocolloquialism II: Tautological Deities for Non/Believers.
This is not for everyone.
It might be for you.
