The McDonaldisation of Occulture

Edition

The McDonaldisation of Occulture

This essay was written in 1997 and is reproduced here in an expanded English version based on the German 2011 edition. The reader is also referred to the subchapters "Does Crowley Sell?" and "Visitors to my Website" at the end of the chapter "Copyright Battles" in volume 2, and to the chapter "Game edition of an O.T.O. fata morgana" in volume 3 of O.T.O. Phenomenon RELOAD (Munich, 2011), where statistical material can be found.

Definition

What is McDonaldisation?

By the term 'McDonaldisation' I mean an emphasis upon things which are calculable or quantifiable, in a context where quantity increasingly becomes a measure of quality, and no hints or evidence are found as to actual quality. Further, I would define McDonaldisation as a symbol-system meant to create enduring emotions, a system that counterfeits order and actual effectiveness to make itself seem more real. These things are what the producer of 'McDonaldisation' expects from his 'product' while McDonaldising it.

McDonaldisation contains other factors: increased efficiency and rationalisation, as in the fast-food chain McDonald's; a predictable and consistent product; how quantifiable that product is in terms of size, number, and quotas — and finally, how it may be considered as a means of control. One example of this may be found in the mechanisms used for increasing the efficiency of postal services in some German-speaking countries; here, 'performance standards' allow exactly 1.71 seconds to post an ordinary letter in a post-box. Similarly, in occultism there is an unusually strong desire for scholarship and detailed numerical schemes, as if anything that cannot be expressed in cyphers, codes and symbols will fade out of existence.

What do consumers now expect of McDonaldisation? They want to get hold of a moderately good product with a strong flavour as quickly and easily as possible. Important factors will determine the nature of such a product: it must be easily prepared, and available everywhere for consumption at any time — in effect, it must be omnipresent. Such products will present society with ideas interpreted through human relationships, and views filtered through the minds of marketing-men and advertisers; ideas and views which tend to treat people as objects, and make humanity itself into a commercialised and therefore consumable resource. Information becomes a part of the game of Interest and Demand.

All these qualities and mechanisms can be found in the American O.T.O. founded in 1977. Like McDonaldisation itself, this young O.T.O. group first extended its sphere of influence from the villages — not merely geographical ones — through the suburbs and into the cities, and has now, entirely in step with the Zeitgeist, flourished in cyberspace. Its branch names include the Gnostic Catholic Church, Mysteria Mystica Maxima, The Esoteric Rosicrucians, The Home of the Order of the Oriental Templars, Hermetic Science College, Translator's Guild, Exo-Psychology Guild, Drama and Thaumaturgy Guild, Alcoholics Guild of O.T.O. and Psychology Guild. At times the centre also tries to borrow sonorous names from other organisations: Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua, Illuminaten Orden, Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, Memphis Misraim, Academia Masonica.

To appeal to consumers, the 'Caliphate' has produced a range of products that resemble a McDonaldised 'illumination through sex-magic'; a McGnosis transported through the iconic figure of Aleister Crowley. It is hidden behind a confusing veil of euphemisms, and is preferably practised on Sundays by means of consuming a 'host' made of sexual secretions, prepared according to Emblems and Modes of Use (in constantly reprinted Crowley books that contain 'enlightening' footnotes by the current 'Caliphate' leaders).

Regarding Crowley's antidemocratic, racist and misanthropic writings, followers point out: "The reason[...] aspects of Thelema are omitted[in public discussion] 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." See The Templar's Reich.

Supermarket

The American O.T.O. as a typical example of McDonaldisation, or: the supermarket as the highest cultural achievement

There are many obvious examples of McDonaldisation in occultism generally — what I call Occulture — from horoscopes in daily papers, through Tarot readings and televised healing sessions, down to the do-it-yourself love-spell kits in esoteric bookshops. The American O.T.O. has not fully entered these techniques yet. With the growing popularisation of the American version of the O.T.O. phenomenon, and with the broader acceptance of ever-nearer border-zones of Occulture by the mainstream, it may only be a matter of time before O.T.O. homepages offer not merely T-shirts and baseball caps bearing the O.T.O. lamen and the A.·. A.·. seal, and not merely pornography as once routed through www.venus.com, but also frozen Amrita delivered to the home.

Above all, the local lodge of the academic showcase Richard Kaczynski — the William Blake Lodge in Greater Baltimore/Washington D.C. — tries hard for the mainstream. Halloween parties are held in public parks, children place their heads through cardboard Crowley cut-outs for photographs, summer picnics offer animal balloons, cycling, face-painting, hair-colouring, barbecue, and of course the obligatory Tarot reading, plus the invitation to learn more about Thelema, the O.T.O. and the Gnostic Catholic Church. All of this is aimed at non-members. "Knights have been traditionally viewed as protectors of children, so please join The Order of Oriental Templars in some charity for kids!"

This domestication of Crowley and Thelema rests on the simple principle that communities in competition, and thus in cultural evolution, have few long-term prospects unless they actively encourage child-production and family formation. This is especially true of religious communities that intend to last longer than secular ones — and they become more durable the more restrictive the rules they impose on members. Each community develops mechanisms that deter free-riders or call them to order. Rituals serve to demonstrate such commitment: whoever undergoes strenuous procedures signals unmistakably that he identifies with the community and is willing to sacrifice something for it. The more radically such mechanisms are applied, the more effective they become. Rituals themselves may even assume a fetish character.

Other local lodges seem actually to exist in a supermarket: "In the Agape newsletter, the OTO USA lists two 'business offices', both of which are simply post-office boxes, (in CA and NY), and then it lists the 'corporate headquarters' of the OTO as 24881 Alicia Pkwy, Laguna Hills CA. This address appears to be in a mall of some sort, with lots of listings for hair salons, donut shops and the like. A search for images online turned up nothing, and I was wondering if in fact their corporate headquarters are in some sort of shopping mall, and if so, does anyone have a picture of this building?"

The term Occulture embraces the culturally generative aspect of what happens in the occult ethnological underground of the West, and what, because of its cultural ambitions, leaves traces in mainstream culture. When I confronted one O.T.O. member with my hypothesis that his organisation contributes to the McDonaldisation of Occulture, he defended himself by pointing elsewhere: "Just the other day, I saw a huge billboard on the street advertising Freemasonry. It had the square and compass logo with a phone number, and the caption read 'To be one, ask one'. And it was right across the street from a McDonalds, too! What next? Disposable Masonic aprons with your Big Mac?" Like so much in the world of market and merchandise, entry into an Order easily appears as opportunistic consumer behaviour.

In the example used here, the American O.T.O. presents itself as a post-modern esoteric supermarket in which Kabbalah, yoga, invocations of demons and angels, exorcisms, animal blessings, sex-magic, religion, Gnosis, scandals, philosophy and pseudo-science all appear as equivalent goods. Whoever brings many wares brings something to someone, especially in a permanently sprouting esoteric market with the character of a peddler's tray. The familiar is sold as new. Crowley's Thelema turns out to be a plain hamburger in glittering wrapping. Anyone may mix his own brew from the Crowley/O.T.O. repertoire. Organised occultism à la Crowley merely supplies the technology by which one is to handle the material, abilities, knowledge, rules, guidelines, procedures and routines. The current officials of the American O.T.O. interpret Crowley's verbal shells and rituals, modify them, abstract new rituals, dogmas and doctrinal edifices from them — for instance the KEW and VIII° rituals, Christian-flavoured rites for child adoption, animal blessings, healings by laying-on of hands and exorcisms.

This turns the O.T.O. into a kind of perpetuum mobile: there is not one single rebirth. The customer expects repeated surges of initiation, and salvation is delivered slice by slice. Promised secrets and adventures are revealed only step by step; the organisation functions as a dealer of yearning. The O.T.O. as an association determines which methods are PERMITTED. Its efficient supply of recipes — sex-magic, yoga, no illegal drugs, and so on — offers instant illumination according to a precise scheme: the hierarchy of the Order. Every initiatory degree means a predictable specialisation in a precisely defined field of symbols and techniques, also in order to neutralise the stigma projected by society or even to intensify it. Every initiation provides new rules and prescriptions which, when executed, are supposed to serve illumination. The class society of the gnostic heaven is to continue on earth. The hierarchy, the curriculum, permits central control, standardisation and surveillance. The optimal route has already been discovered and need only be obeyed.

The structure is institutionalised and subject to strict standards, including examinations. Naturally, prices, doctrines or organisational questions are barely discussed; no leader is elected democratically. Everything is always the same: allegedly every V° has a rose tattooed above the breast; 729 always remains Bafomithr, that is to say a McBaphomet. Creativity across Orders would be inefficient, or no longer loyal to the line.

Fixation on Crowley, however, means stagnation. Here begins the irrationality of McDonaldised Occulture. Freedom in Crowley's O.T.O. is reflected in dogmas and in the logic of the mass market, whose elements overlap but may also exclude one another:

• In secrecy-mongering — nobody is to know that the ultimate secret is merely spermo-Gnosis — and in explicit censorship: technocratic ownership of information and a monopoly on interpretation and transmission. Whoever wants to manipulate must offer the better secrets on the market. Hence the bizarre mania of the American O.T.O. to treat spermo-Gnosis like Coca-Cola's recipe as a trade secret, and to deny any connection with it to the point of absurdity, lest the trade secret be lost.
• In a kind of Thelemic Book Patrol with flame-throwers à la Fahrenheit 451, that is, lawyers. Members who sell secret documents are brought before an internal Inquisition and then expelled from the Order. Books, even antiquarian ones, and manuscripts obtainable through libraries are controlled by the group's chief. No matter when one acquired the secret rituals, the Caliphate controls their handling.
• In opacity: who is responsible for what?
• In the upward-narrowing pyramid of the Order hierarchy, since not all members can ever reach the highest degrees.
• In adaptation to groupthink as the number of members increases, and in growing intolerance of other behaviour within the group. Integration into the group means an ideological dissolution of the self.
• In endless filling-in of papers and tests about knowledge, passwords and signs.
• In degree-dependent interpretation of all events: higher degrees dominate lower members. All Thelemites are stars/equal, but some are more equal than others.
• "If one were to substitute OTO for Army, this would work very well for the Order."
• In the costs of years of dues, used merely for litigation.
• In waiting-times for higher initiations, which benefit only the superiors of the Order, like queues before a customs booth.
• In the replacement of quality by quantity: only he who recruits the most co-workers/members can rise in the firm. The individual loses connection with members of the same level, since ascent, indeed divinisation, is desired.
• In the increased use of the we-form: we think, we want, etc. Thus the variety of different viewpoints and perspectives is flattened into an indifferent group opinion.
• In structural dominance: no alternatives to other O.T.O.-like groupings are allowed. O.T.O. members may not belong to the Temple of Set. A dominant market position, also found in Bill Gates' Microsoft system.

Whereas in a democracy public office-holders, persons in positions of trust and stars enjoy only a limited right to privacy and anonymity, organised occult niches à la O.T.O. reverse the principle: the higher the official, the more pseudonymous the exercise of power, as in the secrecy surrounding the profane names of national princes — the Rex Summus Sanctissimus — or of the Caliph. They cease to be persons in a real world, stripped of the many supposedly superfluous and detailed characteristics that make up a real person. This facelessness and formlessness has the effect that people themselves become faceless and formless. They live in a Kafkaesque world in which the human being is identified only by function. They are trapped in an inner world of moods, feelings and imaginations. This private world is over-emphasised, and the result seems to be a lack of identity: nothing remains except a kind of whimper for attention. Coupled with sexuality and aggressiveness, it becomes a theme of repetitive destructiveness on the Internet.

So everything is merely a pretence of efficiency — most members scarcely reach a higher degree than III°. It seems as if the consumer chewing this burger is the result of the same process as the burger itself. The secret of spermo-Gnosis is in any case an open secret: anyone can practise it without belonging to the club. Nevertheless, membership dues, according to the superiors, are not to be understood as payment for goods and services — such as five to ten per cent discounts on Crowley books published by the USA O.T.O. — but as a privileged contribution to the Great Work. What is one to make of an organisation whose members' only desirable goal is another sonorous title, Order, office, carnival costume with home-made paraphernalia, or degree? What happens when there are none left to offer — when the O.T.O. loses its function as broker and mediator of salvation? Why do individuals voluntarily join an organisation stigmatised by society? Does the Order neutralise the stigma? Can members choose their own stigma? These questions are discussed in the RELOAD chapter on fetish, self-induction and stigma.

Internet

The Internet as an example of the McDonaldisation of Occulture

While I have so far approached McDonaldisation mainly from its utilitarian aspect, I now mirror its mechanisms on the Internet less from a utopian than from an apocalyptic standpoint:

"Imperfectly educated, shut out from intercourse with their fellow-men, and engaged in a trade which employed the fingers and left the mind unoccupied, these men could wander in thought into the most extraordinary regions, and the more imaginative among them found a congenial ailment in works which spoke of a familiarity with spirits, and a power to anticipate the revelations of the future..." — "A Little Magic," in Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round, Volume 5, 1862, p. 400.

The internationalisation of trade and the products of Hollywood's film factories have contributed substantially to spreading the McDonaldisation mechanisms of American culture worldwide. The Internet, as a communication system and carrier of new information-related realities — cyberspace — now reinforces such tendencies on the global supermarket of cosmic vibrations. The Internet — World Wide Web, e-mail, Multi User Domains, ftp, mailing lists, newsgroups, forums, Usenet, p2p, chat rooms, ICQ, Web 2.0, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and so forth — serves as a chaotic collection and exploitation depot for occult-digital documents, in which all data appear equal, while the market balance between producers and consumers of digital works has shifted so radically that most valuable data are not made generally accessible in electronic form at all. Exceptions exist in virtual libraries; obstacles include copyright, data protection and the triviality of most online publication. Casual users and serious researchers alike trust the accuracy and completeness of data on the net. Yet they build upon information of unknown provenance and doubtful quality: digitised searching alone remains fragmentary and question-producing.

Ngram

Books Ngram Viewer

From 2004 to 2010 Google, with the support of forty university libraries, mainly in the Anglophone world, digitised fifteen million books. This corpus includes English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Hebrew texts — about four per cent of all books ever printed. At the end of 2010 researchers at Harvard University proclaimed a new discipline, culturomics, designed to investigate humanistic phenomena mathematically. From the scanned corpus some 5.2 million books were extracted and joined into a single database. The criteria by which these 5.2 million were selected remain unclear.

From now on Digital Thinking and Digital Reading are demanded of the user, who no longer wishes to read texts but to comb through them, rather than submit to the compulsion of context and interpretation. The chimera of simulated ubiquitous availability replaces the question Why? with What and Where! Find-spot fetishism replaces empathic reading. The time saved is booked as progress.

A surplus value is generated at the expense of cropped empathy and missing context through complex linguistic and cultural anomalies. Thus it can be quantified that the size of the English language is growing rapidly, or that in the past it took longer to become famous, whereas famous names are now forgotten quickly. It can be shown, for example, that the names of avant-garde artists or Jewish intellectuals occurred far less often in German books during the Third Reich, making censorship retrospectively visible by quantitative means.

In December 2010 Google's Ngram Viewer showed a decline since 2003 for the term "Aleister Crowley". For the search term "Ordo Templi Orientis", the graph for English-language books showed an apparently unstoppable rise until 2005, followed by a dramatic and continuing fall. A similar result was produced for German-language books. These figures must be treated cautiously: first, only 5.2 million texts had been released for analysis, and second, the dataset expands daily. The Ngram Viewer is also case-sensitive, which complicates quantitative measurement in languages such as English, where capitalisation plays a different role than in German. Similar problems are raised by languages such as Chinese and Hebrew.

Fragments

Fragments

Fragmentation is the major quality of the Occulture (in the sense of Hinduistic variety), of the Internet, and also of how identity is defined in post-modernism. The equality between 'person' and 'rôle' leads to a break-up where multiple or de-centralised selves are the benchmarks of knowledge.

The association of the fragments (or the fragmented perception) has a reason: but there is no ultimate truth behind. This is the imperative of meanings, and their simulation as rôles. Surfing the Net through the ever-changing variety of websites does not require one to use the deeper methods of searching out sources and discerning structures. There is only need of an aesthetic way of simulation and navigation in order to find one's way about in virtual spaces; in a world which is never analysed, but merely inhabited, like Jungian archetypes.

This fragmented self (or rather the multiple subjectivities and post-modern concepts of the self), this life lived as a series of Cabalistic correlations — which constitutes reality for many occultists — is reflected in the endless image-manipulation seen in trances or visions and their written versions, and also of the imagination displayed both on and behind the computer-screen.

Is this a virtual form of Gnosis, where the unbearable body is virtually transubstantiated and experienced anew — but this time not through extreme sports, or sex-magic, or drugs, or Yoga? Does Gnosis become dia-gnosis when mankind leaves the old Temple of the body to find a new home on the Net? There are some critics who have likened this reduction of 'body-ness' to a mouse and keyboard to an amputation of the Self — a process which may induce psychosis. Together with an increased information-flow which may trigger confusion and indecisiveness, these critics view this reduction in the importance of the physical body as one of the major factors impacting on culture; therefore it will have a major impact on Occulture. Disorientation represents a step towards amputating the Self in a sea of choices, and many occultists re-interpret this as the mystical goal of self-dissolution.

The only measure of 'quality control' in occultism is the intensity of what is experienced, which will manifest itself in a passion for 'authenticity', 'true' knowledge, and introspection; the Internet now simulates this sense of urgency, this strong feeling of a 'presence', of being present.

If we define cyberspace as the space behind the images, then it leads to a complete detachment from time, space, and social relevance in Internet communication. Virtual Occulture has been generated; the technological duplication of reality into 'real' and 'virtual' engenders a mere mimicry of activity, and produces 'instant' illumination. Of course the thoughts and ideas that meander round the Net are not totally formless, but their very vagueness, transience, and illusory qualities increase both quantitatively and qualitatively. As the net grows and grows, it gets harder to get hold of concrete ideas and concepts, and more difficult to judge and observe properly. An unforeseen chance to revise traditional approaches to reality has arisen.

Marshall McLuhan recognised the processes of modern media — on the borders of post-modernism — as "extensions of man", a result of the organism versus environment duality. The technical potential to transfer the entirety of human consciousness from the body into data systems can be seen in religious terms as a sort of 'doctrine of salvation'. This expansion of the human brain (which actually treats human beings as equivalent to information) bears a strong resemblance to some occultist's ambition to create or become a homo superior, a master-race of super-beings able to change genetic material at will.

Hence many occultists experience the Internet as an unconscious electronic expansion of the nervous system — a kind of astral body which leads to new forms of human interaction. The hard disk refers to the earthly physical body; with the computer's main memory as formless as mercury, and its processor providing astral energy, the sacred fire bursts forth from the amputated and reduced body in the form of mouse and keyboard. So there are citizens of cyberspace who equate the iconic visual language of programming with the Tarot, and see the data-stores of Internet search-engines as the Akashic Records. It is an odd by-product of history that the allure of what is offered on these computer-screens has meant that rationality has fallen by the wayside, and has ceded its place to newfangled animism.

The Internet as a McLuhanite collective brain goes against the secrecy of certain O.T.O. groups, who carry on as if simply thinking about something would be equal to its production, distribution and trade. Their claims to be the sole claimants to the 'trade secret' of spermo-Gnosis amidst the openness of this collective brain is like some new firm maintaining that they own the rights to fire and air; a dance of the brain's synopsis on the grave of copyright. Intellectual property rights must be redefined, and a new basis for laws found. Code-keys for Internet security replace the traditional boundaries between you and I.

The speed of data-transfer simulates and stimulates an illusion of wealth, power, and community. Any loss of self-restraint through this speed appears to give 'instant' access to an occultist's inner Self; but that Self now seems to have forgotten the most basic rules of grammar or how to think analytically, has no vestiges of 'political correctness', and has lost its common courtesy. The degeneration of much language on the Internet into a kind of Pidgin English is supposedly for reasons of speed, and a result of pragmatism in communication. The fonts, icons, pictures, and animations on the screen, the generally-obtaining silence of Internet communication, the lack of non-verbal clues from body language — all these seem to have led to over-exaggerated sympathies, antipathies, idealisations and demonisations. The disappearance of the sort of traditional consciousness that was moulded by external factors (such as everyday life, the time required for old-fashioned 'snail-mail' to arrive, the need to draft and edit, cultural borders, and so on) has meant that old-fashioned strategies for resolving conflicts have been lost or forgotten. Nike's "Just do it" slogan as seen on the trainers worn by the Heaven's Gate suicide victims comes to mind here: was that another example of the rituals of communication being abused, as supposed 'awareness' increased? Crowley's "Do what thou wilt" became "Do your own thing" in the 1960's; through commercialisation it became "Just do it", and now it is the demonstrative "Do!".

The opportunities in cyberspace to change personality, sex, and age at will, to exist as pure 'bodyless text' or an icon (and an avatar as well) are in blatant contrast to a traditional occult lifestyle and experiences (sports, drugs, music, dance, light-effects, yoga and sex-magic). On the Internet, everything gets reduced to a uniformity of typefaces, formatting, and style. Slipping into this discorporated astral existence is experienced by some occultists not only as the fulfillment of the 'Great Work', but as a concomitant sense of being parasitised or eaten up, with a dramatic loss of energy; for them, it is as if the Internet has become an evil égregore. The processing and assimilation of all the data becomes one-dimensional, a road you can't seem to get off: mental consumption alongside physical stiffness. As a result, there is physical degeneration alongside mental decay: eye-infections and bad eyesight, repetitive strain injury, eccentric habits, headaches, disturbed sleep patterns, and lack of concentration. Another alarming result of this loss of former emotional authenticity is a wish to somehow melt into the computer, like Andy Warhol's desire to become a machine, sometimes seen in Japanese man-machine films. But who needs to achieve this fusion? Nowadays, with the individual definition of what makes up an identity getting more fragmented by the moment, the increase of popular myths that seek to render the world a unity shouldn't astonish us. But does this myth simply arise spontaneously, or do we struggle to promote it? Which myth is it, for that matter: the myth of omnipotence and omnipresence, or that of liberating the body in a sort of Yogic self-loathing, or that of immortality, or that of being like a God? But these are old ideas; the new media are not really devoted to the old desire for immortality, but the Gnostic need to achieve perfection. The physical body has been devalued, and now the need is to at least partially replace it. Neurological technology aims to separate mind and body, so that the mind may be stored in an electronic form, and thereby be improved and reprogrammed. The interest in the possibilities of influencing the body so as to change it and improve it, are symptomatic of a disinclination to accept physical and psychical disabilities. Once again, the rich will win in this race to self-improvement; for instance those in O.T.O. groups who are in a position to determine which members shall be raised to the ranks of the higher degrees — perfect initiates need perfect bodies to perform perfect sex-magic to produce the perfect 'Elixir of Life'.

This allows a new myth to be introduced: being a fictional creation becomes an integral part of being real; to be one simulation among other simulations. Magicians feel comfortable with such a concept, for after all it is just another way of changing the world purely through the exercise of a magically-honed will. The trouble is that these magical wills only seem to express themselves by exposure to constant new stimuli (from higher dimensions, for example), or to download a new mind off the Internet. The proto-fascist Self hides itself in a bunker that is merely the global community of discorporated beings on the Internet, whom they never touch or meet. It's the ultimate form of safe sex, safe drugs, safe transcendence and safe feminism.

Timothy Leary tried to reformulate this theory of virtual cyberspace existence; he wanted human brains to learn how to breathe while diving in and out of what he called the "Datmosphere", while their bodies enjoyed themselves in the slow lasciviousness of the "meat-matter" world. He thought that on the "skin-fluid-level" our left part of the brain is focussed on mechanical, material images, while in cyberspace the right part of the brain seems to be freed to investigate the intense cyber-realities of quick feedback exchange with other sources of information and other out-of-the-body entities. But can a computer screen create expanded consciousness outside the "authorised realities"?

A lot of occultists used to spend a good deal of time wandering around alternate realities in any case — things like the astral planes and the spirit-world. Cyberspace therefore just means another (symbolic?) extension to the 'higher dimensions' to such people, who can annex and decipher such things for their personal magical and consciousness-expanding needs. Although cyberspace seems to be one tool for escaping reality which might confront occultists with scepticism or rejection, one of those responding to my Questionnaire about the 'Use of the Internet' expressed the occult view very clearly: on the Internet "we can just exist." This raises the surreal possibility of people like this perceiving the real world as 'hyper-real' after taking off their cyber-helmets. Thus a renewed allusion to these new media as an 'extension of man' could be made to refer back to the physical world as kind of 'phantom pain' like that from an amputated limb.

Living Room

Tumult in the Living Room

There are some Anthroposophists who see some of Rudolf Steiner's predictions fulfilled through the Internet: freedom of thought, social understanding of humanity, and knowledge of the mind. In the culture of electronic information, these people have seen the realisation of humanistic ideals like philosophical tolerance, and condemnation of censorship and violence; purely a life of the mind, unadulterated by politics, ideologies or mass media.

But in reality the Internet turns out to be a global stage for self-exposure, with only a theoretically cathartic effect; it is a medium for breaking taboos, and of the lowest common denominator. Here there is a meeting of self-confidence with traditional longings and deficiencies derived from popular culture. Access to the Net supports extreme opinions, gives them credibility and an audience. With this socially irresistible hybrid constellation of minds, cyberspace degenerates into a largely æsthetically mediated exposure of the social mainstream, and hence also for the occult commonplaces of ritualised chatter about Yoga, Cabbala, Gnosis, ceremonies, and Crowley (as in some O.T.O. groups). All the claims about the Internet being a form of expanded consciousness turn out to be a simple reconfiguration of the world which allows things to go on as before. It is a semblance of expressing the individual will and plans, an imitation of freedom blinkered by a corset of rituals. Or if you will, the saga of Narcissus updated: McNarcissus.

There is a constantly growing morass of occult 'experts' on the Internet; because there is no control or editorial selection, just about every member of the O.T.O. with a homepage has become an 'expert' in accord with Joseph Beuys' dictum that everyone is a talkshow host — but one is then faced with a duplication of these alleged sources of the truth which eventually completely invalidates any truth. Everything is equally insignificant, although it is presented so that it does not appear like that. Whether it is Benetton adverts, anti-cult organisations, or Tarot cards, it's all the same: the world as wrapping-paper. In the hyper-democracy of the Internet there are no longer such things as 'right' and 'true' as opposed to 'wrong' and 'false', but only the vestiges of what McDonaldisation's methods dictate: faster, louder, brighter, juicier. In this intercontinental debate about the value of knowledge, empathy and the search for quality have to give in to the sheer information-overload and overkill that comes with quantity. What seemed at first to be revolution or anarchy, has rapidly degenerated into conspicuous consumption.

Almost all O.T.O. homepages on the Internet are self-referential communication; apart from their contents, all they tell you is what's on other O.T.O. homepages. The package suggests that it is the contents, (the medium is the message). This self-reference is common among occultists like Crowleyans or Scientologists, and some Masonic 'scholars' (who only quote Masonic literature in their essays), who therefore reinforce their own prejudices.

The McDonaldisation of Occulture might seem to break down these incestuous tendencies by its public Internet exposure; where once it honoured academic titles, and the old distinctions between white-collar, blue-collar, and uniform, now pure ASCII holds sway. Selective attention now decides whether information is worthwhile or not; now it doesn't matter if that information is right or wrong, or even true or false — only whether it attracts attention. 'Netizens' organise themselves in net-rings - communities of interest detached from geography, communities based on time-zones, widespread anonymity, and constantly-changing identities. Constancy and reliability are the standards for affiliation to these Web communities, on the meta-level that is online existence.

Thanks to the Internet, what were previously activities exclusive to occult Orders have become part of popular culture, factual concerns shrink to the level of Web 2.0 'happenings' and second-hand opinions, knowledge becomes data-hoarding, the linear becomes interactive, and proper friendship disappears in interchangeable cyber-interaction. Occulture becomes an audience riven by factions which fishes its half-truths out of the limitless digital pool. This McDonaldised Occulture is an arena where anything goes, a breeding-ground for conspiracy-theories where half-truths are classed as scholarly work — for example in the wholly quantitative use of data exclusive to the Internet in university dissertations and theses. This reduction of facts to hallucinatory speculations leaves no room for the controlling influence of truth, and results in an endless fragmented labyrinth of unlimited choices. Any information here will face a continuing elasticity in a process of transformation and interactive reconfiguration. In the vast catacombs of the hypertexts it is all too easy to lose a feeling for the whole; in the nebulous atmosphere left by an absence of such an overview, connections and continuity can disappear. Where there is hypertext, there is no context. Does this hold out the unalluring future prospect for Internet users of having to develop a robust information immunity against the infection of false information on the World Wide Web?

The Visible

The Visible

More influential than radio, film and TV, the Internet is going to alter our perceptions and our language. Already ten per cent of Internet usage is by children and teenagers — it is the resource-base and market-place of Western society. The EU has instituted plans to provide all schools with Internet connections.

Of course, the huge range of information on the Internet can be a source of inspiration to careful and thorough researchers; and its openness means that it is far more difficult for some groups to maintain their abusive behaviour. It is worth pointing out that the founders of the O.T.O., Theodor Reuss and Aleister Crowley, developed very 'open' and libertarian opinions on education and sexuality (children should be brought up by 'Priest-Doctors' or libertarian Gnostics, and not within a family structure).

The numberless manifestations of multiple identity in our culture — including the creation of Internet personas — contribute to an over-all confirmation of traditional unitary theories of identity, and support the post-modern Weltanschauung. There are relevant metaphors for this running through information science, psychology, children's games, literature, advertising, biology, medicine (you can now do a virtual frog-dissection), mass culture and of course Occulture. The principle of the 'embodied artificial intelligence' is well-known, and used as a paradigm in physics, information technology, biology, and behavioural science — there are already primitive artificial 'beings' that can move independently, co-operate, organise, and evolve. Never has the gap between high culture and mass (or consumer) culture been so narrow. What is visible doesn't have to allude to the concealed, existence doesn't have to allude to essence, nor the signifier to the signified. We are living in an electronic version of Oscar Wilde's disguise, where "the true secret of the world is the visible and not the invisible".

But what disadvantages does the post-modern bring with it? A constant leaping from one subject to another in a world tied to immediacy and simultaneity will erase any consciousness of history. The post-modern individual's passivity and immobility goes hand in hand with an increasing need for ever stronger stimuli.

Things speak for their owners. Property mirrors the I. Will the chatter of things ever end? The ordinary is threatened with extinction. Communities of style become more significant than the milieu-jungle of religious communities. "I am the Brand Name. When all things began, the Brand Name already was. The Brand Name dwelt with God, and what God was, the Brand Name was." Tangible objects implode in the space of imagination: the inverted vision of the neutron bomb.

Branding

… and an infant body suit

The O.T.O. today is a brand, a piece of branding. Under the O.T.O. logo and various Crowley insignia, T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, kitchen aprons, infant and toddler clothing, shopping bags and basketball caps have been sold, not to mention tea mugs, water bottles for the road and adult underwear. Recently even a computer game was designed in which Thelemic characters appear; there is a corresponding War Guild. In the blogs, players delight most in the clothing of the game-identities.

Members urge each other to use www.goodsearch.com instead of the usual search engines. There one may enter a charitable organisation — here, the O.T.O. — to which one penny is donated for every search. Charity, perhaps, thinks of itself as well: begging letters to members recur. Thus on 11 March 1998 William Breeze, head of the American O.T.O., asked for "Financial Support" to conduct legal battles over copyrights: "We will put it to good work." At the Areopagus meeting of 26 June 2000 new possibilities for fund raising were discussed: O.T.O. credit cards and frequent-flyer miles. In natural disasters the charitable impulse was to be put into practice; in 2005 funds were established for the victims of hurricanes Rita and Katrina, and fourteen lodges offered accommodation. In 2007 the headquarters homepage in the USA offered the possibility of donating one's car to the organisation.

While a world-famous brand-name is defined by unity, recognisability and uncompromising fulfilment of customer expectations in order to generate identification and loyalty, the American O.T.O. is in large part little more than a firm intended to allow its boss to live from alleged royalties on Aleister Crowley's works. It is not membership dues from which the O.T.O. superiors cut themselves a salary, but royalties from Crowley works: the American O.T.O. has withered into a legal appendage for the benefit of very few. The whitewashing of this fact by dozens of sugared, consciousness-expanding Internet homepages makes this peace-love-and-pudding look precisely like what it seems to be: a McOTO. From an apocalyptic viewpoint the occult sector of the Internet becomes the place where information, as factor of production and consumer good, is used by a few as a means of control, rule and steering, in an attempt to manipulate the great mass of occult consumers. Marginal religious groups and neoliberal economic ideology à la McDonaldisation are two sides of the same dollar coin.

Versions

Editions and Translations

© P.R. Koenig, August 1998 / 2011. Original version as a lecture for C.E.S.N.U.R. at the University of Amsterdam in 1997 and at the London School of Economics in 2001; printed in GNOSTIKA 2;2, April 1998, Sinzheim 1998. New adapted English translation by Mark Parry-Maddocks, November 2000; expanded here against the German 2011 version.