This essay was written in 1996 and is reproduced here in an expanded form.[1]

We shall concentrate on the following keywords and aspects of occultism as a social construct:[2]
·        Aleister Crowley’s magical religion as a foundation of modern occultism[3]
·        euphoric trance-images
·        cabbala as word-cement between realities[4]
·        occultism bound to occult orders and lodges, and free occultists.

In occultism, the rational and the irrational become one within an enlarged concept of consciousness; they become orientation-aids for human behaviour. Yet the question of why and how the visions of occultists arise and are experienced remains open. The one certainty is that something is experienced on an unknown level of consciousness. This chapter is not the place to discuss the experience of reality, its dependence on consciousness (whether collectively postulated or not), nor the rôle of the brain.[5] The subject is not why visions exist (for example as an expression of fear of the visible), but how they exist as visions, and what contribution to culture this kind of occultism is able to make. Is Herbert Marcuse’s libido as the transcendental principle of solidarity experience being realised in the occult underground of culture?[6]

Pareidolia and cryptomnesia

Wikipedia: “By pareidolia (from Greek para — beside, beyond + eidolon — image or apparition) one understands the tendency of the brain, in its constant search for patterns and images, to find these even in random structures or in sensory impressions of low informational content. A typical example is seeing figures in passing clouds or in the shapes of mountain ridges. Pareidolia is an unavoidable by-product of the normal perceptual activity of the brain. Every perception is tied to the (re-)recognition of abstracted common features (patterns) in repeated sensory impressions, which are formed and stabilised through learning processes. Recognition therefore depends on stored memories. Expectation thus also affects the perception of a pattern. Perception is thereby influenced by communication and is consequently manipulable, intentionally or unintentionally. In this way shared misperceptions can arise, even mass-psychotic illusions (for example the perception of UFOs or the hearing of voices in spiritualist séances).
The probability of seeing such a false image or an actually non-existent structure is therefore greater the more one expects to find something ‘meaningful’. This also explains why, for example, some people believed they could see the face of Satan in the smoke of the collapsed towers of the World Trade Center, or why in the West one sees the man in the moon, while other cultures see an old woman or a hare. Pareidolia is also a known phenomenon in panic disorder (episodic paroxysmal anxiety).”[7]

Wikipedia: “Cryptomnesia (Greek for ‘forgotten memory’, ‘hidden memory’) is a psychological term for the phenomenon in which someone mistakenly, but in good faith, understands himself to be the originator of a thought or creation. In fact, the person has drawn from the unconscious thoughts or ideas that came from an external source. The taking-over of information from this source is, however — unlike the information itself — either forgotten or was never conscious in the first place. […]
One indication of whether plagiarism or cryptomnesia is involved is whether the person concerned has already undertaken acts of concealment at an early stage.”[8]

The brain uses existing ideas about memory and, through altered brain functions, creates a specific constellation of symptoms.[9]

The Holy Books of prophets such as Aleister Crowley are, for their adherents, consciousness-altering codes which, once properly deciphered with the aid of another heavenly shorthand — namely cabbala as virtual reality — leave their cocoon and are symbolically decoded for domestic magical use and adapted to the needs of consciousness-expansion. It remains immaterial whether creativity arises through exchange with the phenomenon (for example trance), or only afterwards through engagement with it. Imagination and interpretation become interchangeable indicators of reality and of holy images. Some of Crowley’s adherents call this magical succession: one’s own alterations of consciousness built upon the visions of other adherents. The creativity released by visions, and the communication about them, condense the reality of this experience and make it holy. This alchemy changes the author and his text becomes a magical child: a world beyond, for display in this world. This becoming-visible, which describes trance-images in rich detail, appears experimental: colliding angles of observation, abrupt associative leaps, sensuous shreds of experience, all combine. Many free occultists seem deliberately no longer to possess a well-defined or unsplintered personality (compared with the traditional concept of the I).

The indefinable moment of freely floating visions without an order-programme determines a new function of the eye: a seeing that stretches beyond everything known until no gaze any longer sees what is simple. An excess of experiential indeterminacy and inexactitude (for example the absence of an exegesis of a symbol-bearer such as Baphomet) permits the occultist not bound by dogma to establish individual relations between sign and signified, new codes and a new rhetoric aimed at new structures. Visions become human extensions in order to reach gnosis, to merge into the Pleroma. Through the need for interpretation, an increase of reflection arises in which neither individual authorship nor regulation by an order-head is any longer required. Magical succession does not call for a constant repetition of permanent stageability (as, for example, in the O.T.O. with its rigid rituals); it is a metaphor for the continuity of strategies of illumination.[10]

As organiser of images experienced in trance, the free occultist reflects the archaic idea of creation in idealist aestheticism. He dissolves material authorship (similarly to the concepts of Marcel Duchamp or Andy Warhol), by reorganising, in a trance-state, what already exists. In this way old traditions are fused into a new whole.

Like surrealism, occultism wants to break open the limits of rational philosophy and logic (à la Descartes). Occultism is connoted with belief in higher realities, in certain forms of association by means of cabbala, in the power of dream- and trance-images, and in the stream of words uncensored by the intellect. As many voices, colours and materials as possible are received in the underground culture of the free occultist. A euphoria of images and voices determines his identity and reflection. Like every utopia, this one draws its energy from longing for a world without limits and reveals the archaic wish, on the one hand to become master of one’s own world and, on the other, to escape the chains of all worlds. Gnosis sometimes demands a stepping-over of the structure of life itself.

The occultist is, however, caught in a dilemma. He strives for world-domination and at the same time oscillates ambivalently between the destruction of culture (through resistance to the ruling morality) and the preservation of high and mass culture (because he needs their magical tradition). There is no equally significant alternative to this absolute claim. Many occultists therefore stumble transcendentally between cultural attraction and the hope of destroying existing culture.
Not all branches of the O.T.O. adopted Crowley’s Thelema. “The reason […] aspects of Thelema are omitted indicates the actual problem with presenting Thelema as a religion and attempting to get Thelema sanctioned by the government or approved by the public: Thelema is ultimately in contrast to and transgressive of normative society. Thelema rejects the morals and values of normative society and acts to transgress and violate these norms. From the inclusion of intoxicants in ritual, to the positive view of sexuality, which frequently is seen as promoting promiscuity, to the pro-authoritarian and Nietzschian aspects of Thelema, normative society has much to reject in Thelema and conversely, Thelema encourages its adherents to reject most aspects of normative society.” [“Journal of Thelemic Studies”, 1;2, 2008, p. 40]

The question “Who is actually speaking here?” brings us to the occult interplay between voices and images. Speech is writing. This subject must be detached from the cultural question and remains of importance only for the legal departments of occult organisations. In the world of the free, order-independent occultist, by contrast, everything is of equal significance or non-significance. As subject, he is freed from the gravity of his uniqueness and becomes a platform for influences of every kind. Mixture is everything and becomes a potentially inexhaustible reservoir of signs. The deluge of voices and images is individually deciphered by its recipient. The occult utopia tries to realise itself as a worldwide network of united individual persons and wants to change society and culture more lastingly than any form of socialism.[11] This network, a kind of occult internet, abolishes every geographical or social distance and reveals itself as a free space beyond juridical borders — despite the resistance of various associations and state organisations that wish to exercise control.

It is rather system-immanent mechanisms that set limits to the effectiveness and flourishing of occult culture. Should the recipient of trance-impressions accept every vision and every voice he receives? Should he voluntarily set limits by exposing himself to a selection of impulse-givers (for example occult organisations or traditions such as Crowley’s Thelema)? Or should he consciously begin his own programme in the esoteric supermarket, which, universally plundered, leaves behind only a completely emptied treasure of total subjectivity?

The development of innovative occult culture is hindered by occult organisations (for example the O.T.O.), since their totalitarian claim on culture (as in every cultural society) consists of repetitions of rituals, signs and so forth, and of little original thought or practice. The order-bound individual is expected to find himself in the cultural repetition of organised occultism, which however inhibits creativity. The visionary blueprint of the supreme visionary, chief ideologue, giver of meaning, maker and namer of images, Aleister Crowley, is overshadowed by his deficient biography and following. Since Crowley died in 1947, he is now controlled by the copyright-holders of an O.T.O. group from 1977, which indicates how the needs of pleasure and the body are to be controlled. This control of body and consciousness shows itself especially in the rigorous dogmatic application of what Crowley left behind in euphoric trance as prefabricated images and instructions, as dogmatic recipe (for example 729 = Baphomet), and in the reduction of sexuality to religiously varnished ritual sex-magic.[12] Sensuality becomes a theatre-war of cultural production. Conscious self-enslavement (controlled by the copyright-holders of occult doctrine) serves as a radical counter-design to mainstream culture. Submission to occult dogma is interpreted as a realm of liberation — although the desired dissolution of the ego turns out to be the product of a superego.

In all this activity, the broad field of occult groups presents itself as a triangle, whose points symbolise the three main reactions to cultural rupture: accepting it, criticising it, or fleeing from it.[13]

The occultist understands himself at once as rebel and narcissist, placing himself both inside[14] and outside the predominant culture.[15] His dogmatised image-worship (for example To Mega Therion) defines itself as a ban on images (for example in the rejection of Christianity or of any criticism). He sees himself as part of an elite and, as a reflective psychopath, wants to create himself anew. Some occultists even go so far as to believe they can consciously steer and alter their genetic and familial material by means of occult practices.[16] The body, especially the head, is no longer defined merely as the metaphorical seat of perception and thinking, but as a nervous switchboard on which all information flowing through it can be newly coordinated like on a mixing desk.

Most occultists are interested solely in the intensity of their own experiences.[17] Occult culture (Okkultur)[18] also means the decline of linear thinking. The possibly constricted space of existence serves as a metaphor for the loss of reference and meaning. Such occult utopias therefore run aground: only a few culture-seekers are capable of breaking definitively with tradition and mainstream culture. Most hard-core occultists therefore remain stuck in their hope of salvation and oscillate between recreation in the world beyond and in the dogmatically meaningless-seeming world here below — either at the kitchen table or in the marriage bed.[19] This they call gnosis — and it is controlled by hierarchically bureaucratic organisations in the register of associations, whose self-reflection reveals itself as a criticism-immune, self-referential system that suppresses and paralyses every occult subculture.

This communication system, unreflected by occultists, serves anyone willing to use it. Occultism therefore usually manifests itself in already existing structures (for example power-oriented organisations such as O.T.O.), or settles in socio-cultural niches of fear and aggression (Satanism, secret societies, Judeo-Masonic world conspiracy, other losers).[20] Countless competing organisations (for example the various O.T.O. groups) show no path into the promised land of the New Age of Aquarius/Horus; they show only the retreat to familiar values of power and consumption in a universe surrendered to the cult of objects and religious artefacts. Double meanings become standard, mood becomes programme, self-perception is interpreted as cultural achievement, and pure imagination as discovery. Dogmatisation infantilises the contents, and those who seek clarity find themselves wrapped in rituals of self-dissolution that do not fulfil the desired goal.

In today’s circus of world-images, occultism reveals itself as a continuation of fashions, habits and mannerisms of self-display: as pseudo-originality. The cultural reality of the occultist points to the symbolic collapse of images and to their reduction to hierarchically ordered signals. Experiencing, recording and processing are reduced, in a consciousness-erasing way, to prefabricated images. The step from finding to inventing is equipped methodically and mathematically. Crowley and his adherents act as archaic tinkerers at the seams of the entanglement between a visible and an invisible world, where unheard things from the unfathomable realm wish to communicate themselves. This is also expressed in the motto of Crowley’s journal The Equinox: “The method of science — the aim of religion.” Crowley’s science, however, is no discursive procedure of interpretation, no place in which knowledge is allowed a half-life. Rather, his concept is charged with the claim to function methodically and to raise rigid esoteric/occult contents to the level of objective knowledge. What it lacks is a sociology of knowledge, the insight that knowledge depends on cultural meanings, on language, and on accessible bodies of knowledge.

What remains is the inflation of gnosis and ego. And an American O.T.O., used by its leader as a decorative element for his calling as a musician.

Endnotes

[1] Original version as a lecture for C.E.S.N.U.R. at the University of Montréal, 1996.
[2] Society articulates opinions about occultism and its ideology, and thereby also reflects gender rôles, class affiliation, racial affiliation, etc., always with an audience in mind.
[3] I do not define occultism here, since its content changes subjectively and culturally, though not the designation itself. In general, when I think of occultism, I mean rather active participation, not the simple receiving of visions: the occultist does not merely observe; he provokes what is to be observed. Occultism may be experienced as a culture of literature, since it spreads for the most part through books, private libraries, specialised bookshops, periodicals and the exchange of manuscripts. At the beginning of the twentieth century, occultism entered novels, travel-writing and boulevardised articles for a simple and financially less well situated public. This led to flexible redefinitions of the concept occultism, which at first spread chiefly in the wealthy bohemian milieu before mutating into a mass commodity available at every kiosk. Bradford J.M. Verter: Dark Star Rising: The Emerging of Modern Occultism 1800–1950, dissertation, Princeton University, 1997, 93ff. William Breeze, for example, first read about Crowley through Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). The original membership recruitment of the Caliphate consisted of members secretly placing recruitment slips with contact addresses into occult books in bookshops. Conversation with Andrea Bacuzzi, April 1988. Secrecy is one of the favourite ideas of Thelemites (as also of many New Religions), closely tied here to fear of persecution and a desired martyr rôle. Andrea Bacuzzi, VIII° and IX°, sees Caliphate members in the same rôle as Christians during the Roman persecutions (201–313). She expects Thelema to become a state religion in 1000 years, just as Christianity did in 391.
[4] Religious outsiders invent an insider language in order to set themselves apart from the mainstream, R. Laurence Moore: Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans, NY 1986. It seems as if subcultures only wish to speak to themselves.
[5] From the large number of non-fiction books on this theme, two only are singled out here: Ulrich Schnabel, Die Vermessung des Glaubens, Munich 2008; Michael Blume, Gott, Gene und Gehirn, Stuttgart 2009.
[6] “Restrictive both in theory and practice, alternative religious systems may be understood as luxury commodities that serve a social function by indicating the believer’s economic, cultural, and social location or aspirations,” “Things other than money and property may count as capital: education, social networks, artistic abilities, cultural knowledge, all obtained at the expense of labor,” Verter, Dark Star Rising, 200; and to master complex occult systems means a great deal of labour and discourages dilettantes. “The educational, financial, and recreational exclusivity of esoteric lore enhanced its symbolic value [… and] flattered the reader’s intelligence,” 209. “To take up the study of occultism, then, was to renounce identification with the lower classes, and to join the ranks of the aristocracy,” 213.
[7] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolie.
[8] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptomnesie.
[9] Patients with non-organic amnesia, for example, display quite different symptoms because they have different ideas — derived perhaps from films — about how memory works. One might also speak of unconscious self-deception.
[10] In this context, members of Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian O.T.O. (or Typhonian Order) may also be regarded as free occultists, since in that order-structure the degrees merely indicate the kind of magic applied, without hierarchical and administrative ballast, and since Grant’s overall vision is an unordered, oscillating conglomerate of innumerable magical currents which virtually forces adherents into creativity. Michael Bertiaux’s O.T.O.A. seems related to this, since every grandmaster can create his own order-system there.
[11] The Platonic idea that culture consists of two parallel religious systems — one illusory, for the masses, and one enlightened, for the knowing — is shattered where Thelema wants to become a religion for the mainstream.
[12] In 1981 the Caliphate published the Codex Juvenis, which specifies exactly what is to be thought during orgasm, with or without the intention of procreation, Magickal Link I;12, Berkeley, December 1981, 2. On behaviour in the temple: “Occassional [sic] sex is of course up to the individuals involved, and in some instances officers may be in short supply; but human nature shows that a married or pair-bonded couple is a risk for the stability of both the family and the official body in the dual ranks of officers of the body. Where convenient, it’s best to have officers from different family units […] Marriage counciling is not an appropriate activity, being basic nosiness. Discussions of Magickal Attacks and evil mindedness are not proper business,” etc., in Magickal Link III;3, Berkeley, March 1983.
[13] Typology after Bryan Wilson: Religious Sects: A Sociological Study, New York 1970.
[14] The Caliphate tries to position Thelema in society as a religion among other religions, but allows rituals or ritual instructions such as the Mass of the Phoenix, Liber Nu, Liber Had, Liber Astarte, Liber Thisharb, Liber VII, X, LVX, XC, CCXXXI and others to disappear from perception, since these seem socially problematic, even if many of these texts are not directly O.T.O. texts but rather belong to Crowley’s A.·. A.·. The Journal of Thelemic Studies, 1;2, 2008, http://thelemicstudies.com /JoTS1–2.pdf, p. 40, may be quoted again: “The reason these aspects of Thelema are omitted indicates the actual problem with presenting Thelema as a religion and attempting to get Thelema sanctioned by the government or approved by the public: Thelema is ultimately in contrast to and transgressive of normative society. Thelema rejects the morals and values of normative society and acts to transgress and violate these norms. From the inclusion of intoxicants in ritual, to the positive view of sexuality, which frequently is seen as promoting promiscuity, to the pro-authoritarian and Nietzschian aspects of Thelema, normative society has much to reject in Thelema and conversely, Thelema encourages its adherents to reject most aspects of normative society.”
[15] See the subchapter on “The Predominant Culture” in the chapter “Playgame Version of an O.T.O. Fata Morgana” in volume 3 of O.T.O. Phenomenon RELOAD, Munich 2011.
[16] See the subchapter on the Ma’at cult in the chapter on Kenneth Grant in RELOAD, and the book Abramelin & Co., Munich 1995.
[17] “The significant issue is not some idea of ‘objective reality’, but rather the individual’s definition of the situation,” Claudia Kowalchyk: A study of two ‘deviant’ religious groups: The Assemblies of God and the Ordo Templi Orientis, NY 1994, 315. “Magic works; this is not open to argument,” 318.
[18] Okkultur is a neologism that reached the mainstream in the mid-1980s. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Thee Psychick Bible, Port Townsend 2009, 11. William Irwin Thompson: Evil and World Order, New York 1976, 35 ff.
[19] At least the temples are to be moved out of private flats: “It serves no purpose for anyone to have a ‘name only’ or vanity Body. They make for a rather pathetic organization, and who wants to be part of that? The adversarial attitude we’ve seen between some local and governing Bodies has got to go, or this process will be slowed. Committed O.T.O. members should be more than willing to help the Order as a whole by making sure their Body reflects current standards and is the best the local membership can build. Moving Order activity away from homes is the most important challenge facing our current generation today. We encourage everyone to visit a non-residential O.T.O. temple to fully appreciate what it means to the community it serves. That sense of ownership simply cannot exist in a home. Separate facilities draw more members, make many of our tough policy questions vanish, and lend an air of seriousness to the Order.” Elizabeth McBryde: “When considering the state of the O.T.O.”, in Agape IV;I, California, 1 May 2002, 4.
[20] The definition of occultism changed after the Second World War: what had previously been either a status-symbol or eccentric — Orientalism, darkness, the secret, sexual openness, decadence — has since then tended to be connoted negatively.