Misc: 20th Century Magic and Weirdness

It hit me recently how most magic folks don't do High Strangeness quite like the Paranormal folks, who lend a delicious air of conspiracy and wide-eyed WTF to the mix.

Chaos magician Gordon White at Rune Soup has long had an interest in the Paranormal, which he brings to his work. Here's a couple of his more famous articles on the weirder aspects of 20th Century magic and occultism.

Below, Peter Grey gives us a glimpse at parts of the usually unexamined mid 20th century magical revival.

Rune Soup:
Very Bad Company – Occultism And Power (2013)

Rune Soup:
The Séance That Changed America (2012)

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Peter Grey , author of Lucifer: Princeps and Praxis writing on his Substack about the very California 1960's reformulation of the American OTO. Sadly, this is a cautionary tale, but one worth reading and learning from.

Taking the Abyss trip
Grady McMurtry’s Caliphornia dreaming

Grady McMurtry. So tragic.

Here's Terrence McKenna, commenting on Huxley and the effect of CIA-asset Tim Leary dropping LSD on a bunch of 18 year old Boomers as a large-scale experiment:

" I am not alone in advocating a revisioning of psychedelics, but my colleagues and I certainly represent a highly suspect and not entirely integrated faction of the human potential movement. In a way, you see, we are still reacting to what happened in the 1960s.

One can say many things about one’s personal psychedelic experiences -and they are always very personal- but if you try to look at ten thousand psychedelic experiences the generalized conclusion you reach about what these things do is: Number one, they dissolve boundaries whatever the boundaries are. And as a consequence they dissolve cultural programming.

So Marxist, shaman, fundamentalist Christian, and nuclear physicist will all find themselves deeply questioning their own beliefs, postpsychedelics.
The thing about LSD that did mark it as different from all the other psychedelics was that a reasonably competent chemist could produce five million doses in a single day! Well, that was unique in human history. When you go to the Amazon or when you take peyote with the Huichol it is quite a chore to get sufficient material for twenty people. So the release of so much LSD into modern society caused the powers that be to assume that the whole social machine was being dissolved in acid – literally, before their very eyes. I think that this was a mistake, to go at it like this. There were many voices at that time, with many theories of how it should be handled. If Aldous Huxley had lived another ten years, it would have been very different. His idea was to get the psychedelic experience to artists, philosophers, city planners, architects… not every eighteen year old on earth."

phenomenal! no notes !!!!

MorganBlack said:

Chaos magician Gordon White at Rune Soup has long had an interest in the Paranormal, which he brings to his work. Here's a couple of his more famous articles on the weirder aspects of 20th Century magic and occultism.

Below, Peter Grey gives us a glimpse at parts of the usually unexamined mid 20th century magical revival.

Click to expand...

I used to follow Rune Soup pretty regularly so read those posts a while back and they're Great!
Some of Gordon White's stuff (mostly earlier) is so good that I found it worth Printing.

I had not seen Peter Grey's substack before though, Grady McMurty's story is so... tragic!
Thanks for these Great links!

I am not super conspiratorial, but the threads get weirder too.

As a magician I usually work alone, so I really don't care if people get coked-out, trip balls, and be as freaky as they want. But this thread bothers me sometimes, late at night.

Some speculative connections I picked up from the Paranormal folks, and that might some bearing on us magic folks, partially in the OTO 3rd degree, and modern pagan trauma-based "breaking social conditioning" idea to awaken your 'pre-Christian' Marvel movie super powers.

File under: Nazis, US Military Intelligence, Drugs, MK-Ultra, UFO Contact Disclosure, and Trauma-Based Occultism.

Consider that UFO contact author Whitley Strieber attended school in San Antonio, Texas. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio became home to several Nazi scientists brought over Operation Paperclip (see Wikipedia ), and who were working in the newly formed School of Aviation Medicine. Strieber would later write ambiguously about strange childhood episodes at Randolph Air Force Base, experiences he deliberately refuses to categorize as either alien contact or human manipulation. The Nazi occult "tradition" - drawing from Thule Society mysticism, Vril philosophy, and a distorted reading of Nietzsche's Ubermensch, held that extraordinary states of consciousness could be forcibly induced through controlled trauma.

Strieber just might be seen as one of the Boomer human guinea pigs in an early MK-Ultra-like program (like the more occult Operation Artichoke- think of 11 in TV show Stranger Things. Like... that. ) , similar to the ones that gave us EST, and maybe 20th century magic ideas when they include a, uh, a heavy dose, (ha!) the idea that deliberately induced trauma will trigger a shamanic experience and break open the spirit world.... or awaken Jedi mind powers, or whatever (depending on their cosmo-conception). I am sure we have all run into people like that.

Consider also the Millennials are the kids of Boomers. So I wonder if there is a parent-child relationship for that stuff (Boomer-Millenial Occultism becoming so prominent in the past 15 years. . Meh, not in my stuff. You do you, buckaroos.