I really like Gordon and Jake Stratton-Kent, but Jake is pretty much responsible for giving pagan diabolism (a relatively new thing) an appearance of academic validity.
And Gordon is pretty responsible for giving plastic shamanism a huge boost. The use of the word "animism" in modern occultism is very much due to Gordon's original intellectual rigor .
All good, but people forgot how much of what we might call "Bad Jungianism" or even " Bad Neoplatonism" 20th-century magic was stuck in. Now that has given way to the"Bad Paganism" of the plastic shaman.
I think Gordon is trying to correct some of the unintended cascade effects here.
The 20th-century "spirits are part of my brain meats" view - and much of the plastic shamanism / diabolist paganism hot take they are totally external "gods, " are both, as Gordon might say, "insufficiently true."
I do get a bit peeved with him because I know all his source material, and feel he strings people along a bit, to get them hooked on theprocess. . He has a paid member's area. I am like, "Motherfucker, this shit is not all that hard IF you gave people access to the same source material I know we’ve both read.
To that end, here the excellent materal I read back in the 1990's, that set me right, from the othewise e Bormer edge-lord book, Hyatt and Black's 'Pacts with the Devil'.
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Since people have a perfectly natural aversion to being thought silly,
crazy, or criminal—or for that matter thinking it of themselves—magic
has quite naturally become “pop psychology” or “meditation.” Which, of
course, from our point of view, much of it is.
This is definitely not to say that every evocation produces genuine
contact with what seems to be an alien entity. Far from it. The majority of
such experiences lay in a grey area rather like Jung’s experience of “active
imagination.” This might be material from one’s unconscious, or it might
be “something else.”
JUNG & THE ARCHETYPES
Since Jung was mentioned, we might as well examine his theory of the
“collective unconscious.” This has been used for decades by well-read
occultists to justify both the operations of ceremonial magic and the idea
that it is explained by psychology.
There is a subtle distinction between what Dr. Jung actually wrote when
he formulated his idea and what it is popularly thought to be. The popular
idea of his collective unconscious is that we all share similar “archetypes”
and myth patterns in the depths of our minds that are somehow passed on
through DNA. So, locked in our skulls, we share images of gods, dragons,
fairies, etc. This idea is fine so far as it goes, but it is not what Carl Jung
believed, according to his writing.
For Jung, the collective unconscious was something shared by everyone,
but he did not believe it was bounded by any individual skull. That is, it
was a metaphysical mind or space that interpenetrated everywhere, and
could produce phenomena inside a person,
or in the outside physical world
itself, with equal ease. He also believed that this continuum contained
knowledge of everything that has ever happened. In
Mysticism, Psychology
& Oedipus the Jungian analyst Dr. J. Marvin Spiegelman said of Jung’s
ideas in relation to magic:
Jung had concluded that beyond the world of the psyche and its causal manifestations and relations
in time and space there exists a trans-psychic reality (the collective unconscious), where both time
and space are relativized. At that level there is acausality and space-time relativization parallel to
the findings in physics.
The archetypes are then conceived of as “psychoid,” i.e., not exclusively psychic… This
“psychoid archetype” is an unknowable factor which arranges both psychical and physical events in
typical patterns… The psychoid archetype lies behind both psyche and matter and expresses itself
typically in synchronistic events.
Jung understood synchronicity as an acausal principle which stands behind such events as
telepathy, clairvoyance, etc… Jung’s conception of synchronicity is a great advance in the
appreciation of occult phenomena and their linkage with both depth psychology and natural science.
However, the peculiar experience of causality in the occult field, the sense that the magician can
“will” or “produce” changes, seems not to be reached by this conception. Synchronicity helps
explain the subjective experience, so important in life, of “meaningful coincidence.”
It also provides a hypothesis for understanding divination in astrology, tarot, and the like. It does
not explain the effects of magic in invoking forces, changing patterns through ritual, effecting
healing or fulfilling desires.
While the description of synchronicity as an “acausal principal” is good,
the activity of the “psychoid archetypes” come perilously close to a
restatement of the idea of the spirit world or the astral plane, and Jung
knew it. We suspect (as have others) that he used the terms collective
unconscious and synchronicity to describe “occult” experiences that he
had had himself and dealt with clinically while avoiding what would have
been the damaging stigma of being labeled a psychical researcher.
Jung also stated that the beings that he spoke to during his “active
imagination” sessions were intelligent entities with an independent
existence outside his own mind.
In the year 1916, entities began invading his house. His children, the
staff and Jung himself observed phantom figures in the house as well as
poltergeist phenomena. This and other phenomena inspired him to write
the Seven Sermons to the Dead, a work that he implies was produced almost
in a mediumistic state.
From looking at this work and many of his letters that were published
after his death, it is clear that he was far more ambivalent on the subject
of spirits than his public statements suggested. He did “psychologize”
occult phenomena at the beginning of his career, but did so less and less
as he became older. Perhaps the most direct reference to his personal
beliefs can be found in one of the above-mentioned letters:
I once discussed the proof of identity for a long time with a friend of William James, Professor
Hyslop, in New York. He admitted that, all things considered, all these metapsychic phenomena
could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the
unconscious. And here, on the basis of my own experience, I am bound to concede he is right. In
each individual case I must of necessity be skeptical, but in the long run I have to admit that the
spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other.