The Occult: An Historical & General Ramble

[This is the outline of a presentation I gave to some peers, not as a first introduction to the occult, but as something to get them more interested. As such,, it is partially philosophical and partially a history of the occult, to indicate where interested listeners could next go. It is not complete in itself, and was accompanied by much discussion. It is also not particularly technical, either philosophically or esoterically. In any case, I thought I would go ahead and post it. Thanks to Anthony Dipofi for inspiration, most particularly as it relates to III.K.]

I. Introduction

“The occult”, and its corresponding study, “occultism” or “the occult sciences”, are designations whose meaning is typically far from clear. More or less equivalently, one often hears talk of “the esoteric” and “esotericism”. While there are clear historical lines of development, traced for example by Antoine Faivre (see his Access to Western Esotericism), it is often the case that these more scholarly presentations privelege a certain external understanding of the disciplines and their subject matter, or, also quite commonly, a certain tradition or certain time period’s definition at the exclusion of any others. Regardless, we shall try to explore some general features, whatever the academically problematic nature may be.

“Occult” means “hidden”, but the nature of what is hidden, as well as that of the hiding itself, are rather opaque. The usual way to interpret this is that occult knowledge is for the elite, that it is somehow unfit for the eyes of the unworthy. The secrets of magickal orders are frequently guarded for this purpose. However, it seems more likely that the secrets will remain secret to those not ready for them, even if those unworthy people confront them head-on in a text or try to implement them in practice. This is because the secrets are layers of interpretation; occult “secrets” need not be hidden to keep them from the unwashed masses. But this is not to be interpreted as a kind of egalitarian statement of itself; it is still true that there must be some sort of levels of initiation (or initiations in different things), though even this is likely up for debate. In any case, it is not always a matter of hierarchy.

Occult knowledge is knowledge that is hidden, a state that is sometimes called “subtle”, in contrast to the “coarse” knowledge of the natural sciences. Occult knowledge is subtle because it does not correspond to directly tangible, universally-organized scientific reality. To apprehend occult forces is itself a subtle feat, one that cannot necessarily be replicated in scientific conditions, which work to reduce or even entirely eliminate the influence of teleologies, “subjective” influences, and particularities, all hallmarks of the occult. The relationship of the hard or natural sciences to the occult is one that is fraught with technical difficulties, but I hope to return to it in a later presentation. This presentation, then, will deal primarily with the occult in general – what it is, its history and various traditions, and a brief thought about why it works (because it really does work!).

A preliminary note: To understand the occult, we must take what I will call an “internal” view of the matter. This means we must look at it from the perspective of a believer, one involved in it as a way of life. If we look at occult phenomena and practices merely from the perspective of a skeptical observer, I can tell you right now that it will not work. What you put in is typically what you get out, though magnified to some degree. It might be said that occultism is the science of belief, using belief to do psychological work; this in turn requires symbols, gestures, and all the trappings of ceremonial magick. But this is just a psychologistic interpretation of the occult, though by no means is it illegitimate. As is frequently said, the neophyte typically begins with a psychologistic, skeptical position on the occult, but as they amass more and more successes and experience more and more unexplainable phenomena, they typically become more direct believers.

In any case, it will not do to look at an occult text “from the outside”. In that case, one completely misses the point, since occultism is, as I have said, about belief, about willpower. If you do not will, you cannot understand what is meant by the various occult theses you will come upon. Occultism is unabashedly perspectival, it is not universal as is science or most other forms of discourse. It is not based primarily upon rhetorical commonalities, emotional connections, or logical deductions, and hence is not generically intelligible. Another example: having a vision can be explained scientifically by looking at certain neural firings in the brain, and so on, but this in no way even touches on the significance of the experience “from the inside”. The inside perspective is that of the occult practitioner, and it is futile to refute this from without.

II. A Brief History of Occultism

In this part of the presentation, I will not go over the entirety of the occult’s history, which is undoubtedly as long as that of humankind, stretching from prehistoric shamanism (insofar as that word can account for a long-lasting and wide variety of phenomena) to contemporary expressions of postmodern chaos magic. Instead, I will focus on a few broad traditions: Hermeticism, Enochian Magic, The Golden Dawn, Thelema, Temple of Set, Chaos Magick, and Witchcraft.

II.A. Hermeticism

Hermeticism is one of the oldest extant forms of magick of which we have a rather good record (the Greek and Demotic Magical Papyri are a good source, as well as the so-called Curse Tablets). This kind of magick started in Greece and Egypt, and was a product of several “streams” or influences: Gnosticism, Hebrew theology, Egyptian magick, and Greek magick, combined into a novel form. Hermetic magick is the single greatest influence on all magick that came after it, and there are many sorts of magick that are called “hermetic” which deviate significantly from the sort of sorcery found in the Magical Papyri.

Hermetic magick is named after Hermes (the Roman Mercury), who was equated by the magicians with the Egyptian neter (God-principle) Thoth, the god of magic and science. Typical hermetic spells were things like love spells, spells to vanquish enemies, and spells for protection from baleful spirits or forces. Casting these spells typically involved elaborate ingredients (such as “the blood of a black ass” and various rare compounded plant materials), words of power (voces magicae), and various ceremonial gestures. There were also so-called “high magick” practices (magick used for initiation or for achieving some kind of divinity), as opposed to these practical “low magick” (aka “sorcery”) operations. High magick, though, would in general not become the primary form of magick until perhaps the Renaissance.

Magick was at this point a kind of outsider art, but was practiced by the learned. Hermetic magick did not discriminate based upon culture or pantheon, itself being born from a novel mixture. Greek gods were invoked side-by-side with their Egyptian counterparts, and often gods were identified with one another more or less wholesale.

Hermeticism’s primary tenets can be found in the Corpus Hermeticum; in particular I recommend everyone read The Poimander. Later, hermeticism’s principles, which include polarity, the various spiritual worlds, and the doctrine of the elements, would develop into ceremonial magick as we know it today, including into the eclectic and in spirit thoroughly hermetic works of Franz Bardon, even exerting and enormous influence on the grimoire tradition of the middle ages and the Renaissance. A great contemporary introduction to hermeticism, in its more modern and theoretical or “high magick” form, is The Kybalion by The Three Initiates. If you are still unsure as to what hermeticism is after this meeting, I would recommend you read The Kybalion. Another good reading, more thoroughly historical, and containing translations of the magical papyri, is Stephen Flowers’s Hermetic Magic.

II.B. Enochian Magic

Enochian magic was transmitted to Dr. John Dee and his seer, Sir Edward Kelley, during the reign of Elizabeth I. Kelley would gaze into a crystal ball while Dee performed ceremonial gestures, chants, prayers, and so on. In the crystal, Kelley perceived angels who gave him a language, Enochian, the “language of the angels”, as well as various invocations or “keys”, containing according to one theory the power to, if successfully performed, open the watchtowers at the edge of the universe and let in the forces of chaos (the demon Choronzon), effectively ushering in the apocalypse.

The angels told Dee and Kelley all kinds of very disturbing things, urging them to share their wives in common, to endanger themselves by denouncing Emperor Rudolf and admonishing him to follow the angels’ teachings, and to cast aside morality. Kelley asked an angel why they were telling them to commit so many sins, and the angel replied, “What is sin?”, after which the two men attempted an explanation, to no avail.

Enochian magick is extremely powerful (I have very little experience with it). The works of Aaron Leitch are supposed to be very good for anyone who is interested. Aside from being so powerful, the story of Dee and Kelley is worth looking into in much greater detail than I can provide here.

II.C. The Golden Dawn

Undoubtedly the most prominent magickal order of modern times is the Golden Dawn, active primarily from the end of the 19^th century through the first few years of the 20^th. The Golden Dawn was headed primarily by S.L. Macgregor Mathers, who found a secret “cipher” manuscript written by a German adept and containing the authority to set up a new magickal order in England. Mathers decoded the cipher and wrote to the adept, who, by her authority derived from the “Secret Chiefs”, gave the go-ahead to Mathers.

Why did Mathers need such authority? At the time, it was a common occult assumption that there was a secret society of world-historical proportions that had been guarding ancient secrets for millenia; the society is sometimes termed the “Great White Brotherhood” or the “White Lodge”, the members thereof being termed the “Secret Chiefs”, transcendent masters who were working behind the scenes to guide humanity to spiritual evolution. This is, then, a rather concretized version of the so-called perennial philosophy.

In any casy, the Golden Dawn quickly became a potent force in the occult world. Two of its most famous members are Aleister Crowley (greatest magician of the age) and W.B. Yeats (the poet). The Golden Dawn combined qabalah (the Hebrew “Tree of Life”, a kind of meta-mythological emanationist philosophy/theology, dealt with more below), tarot, Enochian magic (as noted above), hermetic magick (including especially elemental magick), and so on. The Golden Dawn had an elaborate grade structure based upon the spheres of the Tree of Life. The Golden Dawn system of magick is very white-light, very pious and holy, its primary instruments of practice being based strongly on Judeo-christian mythology interspersed with Greek and Egyptian paganism. In any case, a crisis precipitated the demise of the Golden Dawn, though several spiritual successors and supposedly legitimate offshoots now exist.

The classic work on the Golden Dawn is simply titled The Golden Dawn, collected or “revealed” by Israel Regardie, Crowley’s one-time secretary. A better introductory work is undoubtedly Peregrin Wildoaks’ By Names and Images: Bringing the Golden Dawn to Life.

II.D. Thelema

After Crowley left (or was kicked out of) the Golden Dawn, he eventually formed his own occult philosophy called “Thelema”. While in Cairo on a honeymoon with his wife Rose Kelly, Crowley received a text called The Book of the Law. It happened something like this.

Rose became despondent and began going into trance states, though she knew nothing of magick nor mysticism. She started saying strange occult things to Crowley, who thought she was just trying to trick him. She said she was the messenger of Horus, so Crowley took her to the museum in Cairo and asked her to point out Horus to him, thinking to expose her game. She walked straight to the Stele of Revealing, numbered in the museum as exhibit 666, and pointed to Ra-hoor-khuit, a composite god made from Ra and Horus. Crowley was astounded. She then began to give him ritual instructions for the invocation of Horus. Crowley, now believing her to be the messenger of that god, took her back to their living quarters and did as she said. On three successive days, March 20-22, from noon until 1pm, a figure appeared in their temple (a room in their apartment) and dictated to Crowley three chapters that would become The Book of the Law.

The first chapter is the perspective of Nuit, the Egyptian star-goddess, goddess of the night sky, a circle of infinite circumference. Nuit is a goddess of love, representing, among other things, the macrocosm, the universe, and non-duality. The second chapter is the perspective of Hadit, whose name is a mistranslation/mistake, but who is represented as a kind of winged disk on the Stele of Revealing. Hadit is the infinitesimal point within, the highest contraction of the soul, the serpent who raises his head to unite with Nuit in bliss. Finally, the third chapter is the perspective of Ra-hoor-khuit, in other words Horus. This chapter is incredibly brutal, prophesying and even advocating violence and brutality. In this chapter, Horus is the crowned and conquering child ushering in the New Aeon.

The Book of the Law indicated that Crowley was the prophet of the New Aeon, the Aeon of Horus. This aeon succeeded the previous Aeon of Osiris, which in turn succeeded the Aeon of Isis (the characteristics of those gods supposedly having some bearing on the general constitution of the age). The Aeon of Horus was supposed to be one of force and fire, brutality, war, but also freedom. In the Aeon of Osiris, the cult of the dying god ruled; it was an aeon of restriction and suffering, represented by solar gods such as Osiris (and also Jesus Christ). In the Aeon of Osiris, the sun going down at night represented death, and the dawn the rebirth to new life. The Aeon of Horus, by contrast, is supposed to be stellar rather than solar, and to represent the insight that the sun does not die, but is constantly burning. It is a very Nietzschean sort of aeon, one of freedom, of will, and of love.

Crowley’s system can be summed up in two doctrines: “Do what thou wilt shall be the Whole of the Law” and “Love is the Law, Love under Will”. The goal of Thelemic magick is to achieve “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel”, in other words to find your True Will, and then to do it. Crowley, it would seem, mixed the “high magick” and eclectic approach of the Golden Dawn with genuinely blasphemous heterodoxy and a kind of emancipatory focus on will and freedom.

One can read many of Crowley’s own texts for more information. In particular, I recommend Gems From the Equinox and Magick: Liber ABA, Book IV. Everyone should read Liber AL vel Legis: The Book of the Law!

II.E. The Temple of Set

The Temple of Set was born from the ashes of the Church of Satan. The Temple of Set, however, is also a kind of successor to Crowley. The focus of the Temple is “Left-Hand path” occultism, in other words instead of seeking union with God, it seeks the deification of the individual, a kind of full realization rather than an annihilation of the ego. It too seeks a kind of “True Will”, but it tempers the libertinism advocated by Crowley with its deep concern for autonomy and the integrity of the self and the will.

The Temple of Set advocates for a split between the “Subjective Universe” and the “Objective Universe”, in other words something rather similar to my own thoughts about the “interior” and “exterior” perspectives, this time applied to individual human beings. One should work to strengthen and control completely one’s Subjective Universe, though magick can also influence the Objective Universe from time to time. The Temple, therefore, has an eclectic and non-dogmatic approach to magickal systems, though always with the above focus.

The best readings on the Temple are probably as follows: Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path by Don Webb, and The Seven Faces of Darkness also by Don Webb (for a more immediate and Hermetic approach). Michael Aquino’s The Temple of Set is a good account of the doctrines and history of the Temple.

II.F. Chaos Magick

Chaos magick is basically postmodern magick that eschews any kind of systematization. It is radically individualist, believing that one should use what works and discard the rest, with “what works” being irreducibly individual. Beyond that, there is not too much to say about “chaotes”, as they are often called. Chaos magick is usually non-symbolic or personally symbolic, breaking rituals down to their simplest psychological components.

Good introductions to chaos magick include: Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut, Stephen Mace’s Stealing the Fire From Heaven, and most stuff by Robert Anton Wilson.

II.G. Witchcraft

Generally speaking, there are two primary forms of witchcraft around today: “wicca” and “traditional witchcraft”.

Wicca was consolidated (or invented, depending on who you ask) by Gerald Gardner in the 20^th century. Wicca is primarily a form of New Age moon goddess-worship. It does utilize magic, but is not really part of the usual “occult” trajectory, being more a religion than an occult system. Therefore I will not really deal with it here.

“Traditional witchcraft” is the name given to non-wiccan pagan witchcraft. It is typically still based on the myths and folklore of the British Isles, though it is far “darker” in tone than wicca. Some forms of traditional witchcraft are almost full-on Luciferianism, worshiping entities described in apocryphal biblical texts (like Azazel and the “Watchers” from the Book of Enoch) right alongside the Horned God and Earth Goddess types. The most esoteric and by far the most interesting form of traditional witchcraft is the Cultus Sabbati, formed and developed by Andrew Chumbley (who, if he had not died young, would certainly have been the next Aleister Crowley!). He wrote Azoetia and The Dragon Book of Essex, mixing Sufism, traditional pagan witchcraft, Crowley-type stuff, and an emormous dose of Alpha Draconis-based dark spirituality.

A good introduction to traditional witchcraft is lacking, but I would probably recommend starting with Robin Artisson’s The Witching Way of Hollow Hill.

III. Occult Techniques & Theory

Now that we have a basic grasp on the history and contemporary traditions of occultism, we can take a brief look at the actual workings of occultism, though in this area things get a lot more subtle, and a lot more tentative.

III.A. Myths & Symbols

Myths and symbols are a huge part of occultism. Occult practice functions primarily through symbol. Occult knowledge, it is sometimes said, can only be transmitted in the form of symbol. Why is this? It is because the imagination, particularly the symbolic imagination, has a privileged position with regard to the Soul or Spirit (depending on what vocabulary one uses, these words switch meanings). The Spirit as the higher (or even highest) faculty of the human being cannot be interacted with on the discursive level. In order to interact with it, we must use symbol. The direct apprehension of the subtler aspects of reality, therefore, must be transmitted via symbol. If we “translate” the occult symbol into words, it loses this ability and typically becomes a rather ridiculous sort of thesis. Often, when trying to explain to people occult truths, both me and the listener end up saying “what? That’s it??”

Myths, furthermore, are just moving symbols, strings of symbols put together to create (or rather express) more in-depth occult truths.

III.B. Qabalah

The qabalah is more or less the universal master key of the practice of magick. Crowley explained that the Tree of Life was a “filing cabinet” in which to place whatever element of reality. The Tree of Life is more or less an enormous set of correspondences, a meta-mythology. Osiris, for example, can be placed into sphere 6 of the Tree of Life, Tiphareth. Odin can be placed, in his aspect as King of the Gods, in the fourth sphere, Chesed; in his role as initiator and god of magick, he can be placed in sphere 8, Hod. So you see the flexibility of the qabalah as a meta-mythological filing cabinet.

Aside from this aspect, the qabalah has a definite philosophy associated with it, derived from Jewish mysticism (the spelling often differentiates the Jewish Kabbalah, Christian Cabbalah, and hermetic Qabalah). It is a philosophy of emanation wherein God manifested himself in 10 different aspects or “Sephiroth”, and in a definite order. At the top are the three “veils of negative existence”, the AIN SOPH AUR (the limitless light), AIN SOPH (the limitless), and AIN (nothingness). After this, God manifested as a pure point, Kether, the Crown. From here, God emanated into Chokmah, or Wisdom. Chokmah is pure force, also associated with the Father. Wisdom then gave birth to Binah, Understanding, the Mother, pure form. Next comes the Abyss, which separates the top three, the “Supernal Triad”, from the other seven spheres. The Abyss has great significance for initiation, as it separates divine consciousness from the ego.

After the Abyss comes a strange thing: a non-sephirah, a sphere that is not one: Daath, Knowledge. In the Fall from the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve ate from the “Tree of Knowledge”, they ate of Daath. As the 11^th Sephirah, Daath is hidden, and is often described by Jewish kabbalists as “the false sephirah”. Its mysteries are deep, and we cannot plumb them here, but suffice it to say that the Fall of Man resulted in the death of Daath and the creation of the Abyss between the Supernal Triad and the lower sephiroth. There is a reason the Tree of Life is not perfectly symmetrical now, though it once was.

The first sephirah below the Abyss is Chesed, Mercy. It is after Chesed that the right-hand pillar on the Tree of Life is named “The Pillar of Mercy”. After Chesed comes Geburah, “Severity”, naming in like manner the “Pillar of Severity”. After Geburah comes what is basically the center of the Tree, in the Pillar of Mildness, Tiphareth, or Beauty. Tiphareth is the Sun, the higher consciousness, harmony, and so on. Attaining Tiphareth is attaining Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. After Tiphareth comes Netzach, Splendor, corresponding to Venus, inspiration, art, and so on. After Netzach is Hod, the analytical intellect, Mercury, intelligence, and magick. Then comes Yesod, the “Foundation” (of the manifest world), corresponding to the Moon (on the middle pillar below Tiphareth, the Sun), dreams, and so on. Finally, there is Malkuth, the Kingdom, representing the Earth and the manifest universe as we know it. It is in Malkuth where we begin our quest.

Finally, there are said to be 4 “worlds” in qabalistic philosophy: Assiah (the material), Yetzirah (the astral), Briah (the mental or creative), and Atziluth (the archetypal or causal). Assiah is self-explanatory, corresponding to Malkuth. Yetzirah corresponds to Yesod up through Chesed, and is roughly equivalent to the imaginal world of image; almost all magick works through the astral world. Briah’s associations vary, but usually it corresponds to Binah and Chokmah. It is kind of like Plato’s world of Ideas, but more mystical. Finally, Atziluth corresponds to Kether and is almost completely beyond human understanding.

There is an enormous amount of information out there on the qabalah. The Golden Dawns’ grades are based on the spheres on the Tree of Life.

III.C. Ceremonial Magick

The practice of ceremonial magick is usually based on the qabalah. But even if it is not, it usually functions by two primary magickal means: names and images.

Holy names or words, voces magicae, are in a ritual setting inseparable from the concept which they are supposed to “signify”. Words thus have a very different function in a ritual, being not mere significations, but active doings. They activate Mental (Briatic) powers. These words are to be vibrated rather than just spoken – that means they should be projected loudly and slowly, using muscles in the chest and throat to increase resonance. They should sound almost like Tibetan throat singing if done correctly (this is hard, I admit).

Images, in the context of ceremonial magick, invoke aspects or forces in the astral world. Images are particularly signaled by color; color imagination is very important in Golden Dawn style magick in particular. An image of a spirit or angel, for example, is supposed to actually take on the powers and significance of that angel itself, and should really be inseparable from that of which it is the image. One way to think about it might be this: we create an image of a spirit we wish to interact with, making it as lifelike as possible, including the correct colors. Then with a magick word we breathe it into life (the Briatic world is also called the “creative” world). This is how we invoke or interact with, for example, the archangels in the typical Golden Dawn rituals for banishing or invoking.

Speaking of which, there are two general forms of Golden Dawn magick: banishing and invoking. Banishing works just like it sounds, getting rid of unwanted influences in the spiritual or even material realm. Banishing is best done before moving on to other more delicate procedures. Invoking rituals, on the other hand, summon a specific power to inhabit the body of the magician or the temple in general. Dramatic invocation is a particularly potent form of invocation, where a particular god is called to inhabit the magician’s body and mind; this is different from spirit possession (also called “mediumistic possession”) because the magician does not lose control over their body or mind, but are rather filled with divine consciousness and presence of the specified type.

A typical ceremonial magickal working might include the following: first a banishing ritual to clear the air and create an aura of sanctity; then a preliminary invoking ritual or rituals of some kind; then the steps of a dramatic invocation, such as reading hymns to the chosen god or so on; then, if necessary, another banishing ritual to once more clear the air. Of course, not all workings are straightforward invocations of a single god.

Much ceremonial magick works through associations, and invocation particularly so. For example, the east is associated with the archangel Raphael, the season of Spring, dawn, the element air, the color yellow, the divine name YHVH, and so on. Stringing together associations can produce a rapid accumulation of surplus meaning or sense, which can then be put to use in magickal activity, which activity can then itself be thought of as a kind of interpretation (one that transcends mundane reality, of course).

Or again: in an invocation of the god Aries, I might proceed as follows. I adorn my altar with the color red, placing an iron rod in a central location. A picture of Aries hangs from the wall. It is warm in the room, and there is as much fire as I can safely produce. Atu XVI, The Tower, is displayed prominently. A martial song is playing in the background. And so on. The goal is to make the mind oversaturated with the imagery of the desired deity. The fact of association is more important than the “objectivity” of the association. That is, even if we think that no association is in itself necessary, we might consider (in a structuralist way) the chain of these signifiers as differing from other chains to be what is important. Tables of associations are easily obtainable online, but one must really actively associate the elements strongly in one’s mind for such an invocation to work.

III.D. Divination

Divination is not merely the predicting of the future, as if the divination itself were external to the matter. Through divination, we can influence the outcome, or come to understand it better, and not merely register it as an inevitability. Tarot is probably the most fleshed-out and flexible system of divination, though runic divination and the I Ching are also effective.

Divination cannot be explained by scientific principles, because science deals with universalities, in this case specifically probabilities. But when we draw a card in a tarot reading, we are not drawing a probability, we are drawing this card, and even if explained “you had a 1/78 chance of drawing that card”, the irreducible specificity of this card does not even enter into the equation (and indeed, it cannot on principle).

The best divination is done for oneself, where you draw the cards and, through long association and connection with outcomes of real events, you immediately know what the cards mean. In other words, you use your subconscious immediate reaction to understand your own hidden associations with the relevant cards. This is at least a good psychologistic interpretation of the powers of tarot divination.

III.E. Numerology

Much of occultism is based on number. The qabalah is the most obvious example, each sephirah corresponding to a number and the qualities associated with that number. Pythagorean number mysticism is another example.

Numerology, in particular qabalistic “gematria”, is an easy way to build associations. Each letter (in Hebrew, Greek, or English) is given a value. Each word is the sum of the values of the individual letters. Large resulting sums can furthermore be broken down into single-digit numbers by taking the “cross sum”, that is, adding together each digit. This can be repeated as necessary. For example: the sephira “Geburah” is, in Hebrew, “GBRVH”, that is, 3 + 2 + 6 + 200 + 5 = 216. Furthermore, the cross sum of 216 is 2 + 1 + 6 = 9. We can look up the associations of the number 216: wine, a man, fear, cleanness, profound. Or, less significantly, for 9: to be strong, powerful one, brother, to despise, to heat. This will supposedly give us some insight in to the nature of Geburah. It is easy to get carried away with gematria; take it with a grain of salt.

Another interesting thing to consider is the numerical nature of conceptual relations. We can, for instance, think of the four elements as the conceptual apparatus corresponding to the number 4. Lacan said somewhere that the number of concepts already tells us a lot about what the possible meanings and relations of those concepts could be. Two concepts is obviously a duality of some kind, while if there is a third it offsets or transcends that duality. Four concepts is a stable set of axes, while five offsets the two axes in some manner. Hence we find the number 4 to signify stability, while the number 5 signifies strife or discord. I think this would be an interesting path to pursue.

III.F. Astrology

Astrology has a poor reputation because it often bleeds into semi- or pseudo-scientific claims (depending on who you ask). Astrology is in general the study of the influence of the heavenly bodies, i.e. the seven classical planets and the zodiac, on the life and activity of humanity and the cosmos as a whole.

The most important astrological facts for each of us, based on the day and hour of our birth, are: sun sign, moon sign, and “ascendant” sign. The sun sign will be the most prominent and important sign, with the moon sign second, and the ascendant third. One can consult the internet for specifics, but again, take it with a grain of salt, especially because a complete birth chart will give a very different picture than a mere sun sign. For example, it is not only the individual signs itself (and there is a sign for each of your planets, as well as other designations like “ascendant”), but also important is the relationships, that is, the angles between any two planets, which can form trines, semitrines, and so on, which each have different meanings for your life.

It should also be noted that each sign is either cardinal, fixed, or mutable; each sign also has an element and a planetary ruler. The signs’ designations are as follows:

1. Aries – Cardinal – Fire – Mars
2. Leo – Fixed – Fire – Sun
3. Sagittarius – Mutable – Fire – Jupiter
4. Cancer – Cardinal – Water – Moon
5. Scorpio – Fixed – Water – Mars
6. Pisces – Mutable – Water – Jupiter
7. Libra – Cardinal – Air – Venus
8. Aquarius – Fixed – Air – Saturn
9. Gemini – Mutable – Air – Mercury
10. Capricorn – Cardinal – Earth – Saturn
11. Taurus – Fixed – Earth – Venus
12. Virgo – Mutable – Earth – Mercury

The planets have a powerful influence on us because they are so big and close. The stars, and consequently the constellations, are typically viewed as more subtle and supernal powers. The difference between lunar, solar, and stellar occult traditions is one about which much could be fruitfully said.

III.G. Microcosm, Macrocosm

As you read in the reading for this week, the human being is a microcosm, a holographic reflection of the universe as a whole, at least in its spiritual respects. To change yourself is to change the cosmos – to go within yourself is to go outside yourself. This is the traditional view of how magick works, according to hermeticism and its derivative traditions.

But this does not automatically work. If the human vessel is corrupt or spiritually damaged, the correspondence to the macrocosm will not work, and hence the magick itself will be much weakened. We must make ourselves microcosms. That is the first goal of magick, and is represented by the balancing of the elements within oneself. It clarifies or cleans the mirror of our soul, so to speak, and allows passage to be made from the spirit to the material body and vice versa.

III.H. The Great Work

So what is the point of the occult? Why would one practice occultism? There are generally two primary answers: to develop spiritually, or to get shit done.

Spiritual development is itself split into two traditions: the Left-Hand Path and the Right-Hand Path. The LHP seeks self-deification, while the RHP seeks to dissolve in union with God. Both traditions, however, typically have a two-step process: first, Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel, in other words contact with the True Will; and second, transcending the mundane ego. In the LHP this transcendence results in a kind of identity with the True Will and a transcendent individuality separate or isolated from others (not in a bad or lonely way; it merely describes the singularity or autonomy of the self). In the RHP this second step is merging with God, annihilating the self and becoming everything (or nothing!).

The other answer is to get stuff done. Sometimes the occult is used for its “low magick” or “sorcery” potential, to improve one’s life by influencing external factors; for example, one could cast a spell to pass a test, or to get a lot of money, or to overcome anxiety, and so on. The earliest kinds of magick of which we have a record are usually of this type, but since the days of the Golden Dawn this kind of magick has taken a backseat to “high magick” or “theurgy”.

We should talk about precisely what we want to accomplish in this group, although we are nowhere close at present to our True Wills, or to making a decision between the LHP and RHP. And in the early stages of (elemental) work, high magick and low magick are relatively close together, since the magician must balance the self (which is inherently beneficial in life as such) before moving on to theurgy. In any case, magick is not merely a thing you do, it is a thing you are, more a way of life than a hobby, at least if it is done as intended.

III.I. Yoga & Meditation

No magickal practice could be complete with meditation and possibly other yogic practices (pranayama, breath control, prime among them). Meditation is the means for trance states, by which spiritual and subconscious messages can be communicated.

Meditation is generally of two types: concentration and insight. Concentration is focusing upon one single thing for an extended period of time, usually the feeling of the breath as it moves in and out of the nostrils. Important stages of concentration meditation are as follows: pratyahara, or “withdrawal from the senses”, when one sort of subtracts one’s mind from the body and from external reality; dharana, or “thought control”, where one can willfully hold the object of concentration steadily for a period of time; dhyana, when, according to Swami Vivekananda, “...the mind has been trained to remain fixed on a certain internal or external location, there comes to it the power of flowing in an unbroken current, as it were, towards that point”; and finally, the ultimate stage of yogic meditation, samadhi, or god-consciousness. Crowley first achieved dhyana after reducing his breathing to one breath per minute for a full eight hours.

To do concentration meditation, sit or lie as still as possible. Do not move at all while you are meditating. Do not think of anything but the feeling of the breath in the nostrils. If your mind wanders from the breath, firmly but gently return it to the breath with your will (here will be a profound early encounter with the magickal will…). It may help to count down from 10 with deep breaths (i.e. breathe in and say or see the number “10”, then breathe out “10”, then in “9”, and so on). Concentration meditation is almost certainly the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life, and even though I’ve been doing it for quite a while now I am still not very good at it. The key is to practice strictly and regularly, to breathe deeply, and to stay as utterly still as possible. This is the backbone of any mystical or magickal practice, and you will probably get more immediate results from meditation than from magick. Try to do this at least 15 minutes a day, if possible. There really is no upper limit when concentration meditation stops being beneficial, but even most yogi masters stick to about 4 hours per session.

Insight meditation is in some sense the opposite of concentration; where concentration closes off the mind and turns consciousness inward, insight meditation seeks to experience everything at once as a single whole. To do insight meditation, try to focus on everything you are feeling at once; do not divide up the experience into the feeling of your head, of your feet, etc. Then add to that sensation everything you are hearing; try not to differentiate between hearing and feeling. Finally, add everything you are seeing. While doing this, breathe deeply and try not to let any words enter your mind. Try to see the oneness in all that you are experiencing. If you gain some proficiency in this, normal waking consciousness will feel profoundly unconscious, for you will have experienced an expansion of consciousness that you could not even conceive before. This meditation is good because you can do it anywhere at almost any time, and is not as fragile or time-consuming as concentration.

III.J. Occultism and Language

Occultism has a strange relationship to language. The realm of discourse has a decidedly negative or damaging effect on experience, according to the occult traditions. This is because language takes us outside of ourselves. Put another way, language takes things externally, refuses to inhabit their inner processes, and thereby stops us from coming to true knowledge. We fail to experience a movement or concept as it is in itself when our experience becomes lost or othered in language.

Consequently, the language used in occultism is either of an evocative kind (to produce a certain mental state), an intentional kind (to announce one’s will and thereby objectify it), or a magickal kind. This last kind makes words transcend language and interpretation, instead manifesting directly as force, as a magickal action and as the presencing of the entity whose name is vibrated.

According to Kenneth Grant, the “barbarous names of evocation” work in this magickal way precisely because they are so barbarous. These names – “GOLACHAB”, “ABLANATHANALBA”, “IO ERBETH, IO PAKERBETH, IO BOLCHOSETH, IO APOMX”, and so on – activate a certain part of the back of the brain (the reptilian brain) via their barbarity and function as terrible and divine. Whether any barbarous name would do or whether there really are particular names or sounds corresponding to particular forces I leave to you all to discover for yourselves.

III.K. Occultism as Philosophy

The word “philosophy” actually means “love of wisdom”. Wisdom is not knowledge, nor is love possession. Philosophy, then, is an activity: the science and art of striving for wisdom. What is wisdom? Wisdom is not a thing, not something that can be known on a correspondence model of knowledge or truth, and not something that can be apprehended externally. Wisdom is much more a way of life, something almost completely lost in contemporary academic philosophy. To strive for wisdom is to seek truth, certainly, but it is to seek truth as a process of living. This implies the greatest taboo in all of contemporary philosophy: Know Thyself! Note that this knowledge is not at all like the external knowledge of correspondence, of argumental superiority, and so on.

I say this is a taboo because the academy is not about you or me – it is about knowledge, something if not objective, at least objectively studied and presented. Personal issues have no place – the closest we get to that is Nietzsche, but even then our pious commentary ruins the effect. We are not philosophers, and the academy is no place for a philosopher. Rather, the academy is for scholars, for those who comment upon other works, who deal always externally with everything. Scholarship is an inherently external activity, and for that reason it always clashes with philosophy, and treats philosophy with mistrust.

But it was not always this way. Experience of oneself, mastery of oneself, used to come first – see Plato, or Pythagoras. Without knowing yourself, how can you possibly know what truth is? How can you possibly know reality? How can you know wisdom?

What must once again be reconstituted is an occult philosophy, a striving for wisdom that externalizes itself and aids in other strivings, that opens pathways to the divine and blazes trails of thinking and being. This is the most vital task of philosophy today, and we cannot accomplish it if we do not take into account the insights of millenia of occult speculation on the nature of the self, the will, truth, reality, and of course the divine.

IV. Conclusion

This has been a relatively broad and general introduction to occult traditions and several of the practices associated with occultism. If there are any particular areas of interest, I can write something up on those, or merely discuss them with you. This has been intended to showcase the breadth of the occult tradition. Questions?

Notes on Materialism, Neoplatonism, and Ineffable Experience

Some thoughts currently going through my head: 

1. Does the possibility of the “supernatural” rely on individually-directed powers, as opposed to those universally-directed/generally-directed powers recognized by modern science?
 
2. Relatedly, what on earth is materialism? Or idealism for that matter? I definitely have deeply idealist sympathies when defined in one way, but if we take materialism to be the postulate that thought and being might not necessarily coincide, then perhaps I might be a materialist. Why? It seems to me that materialism as a privileging of difference, as against the thought of identity (identitarian thinking, identified by Adorno), enacts a kind of strawman of idealism. Badiou, for his part, has fallen into line with this definition, or more precisely a closely related one, where materialism is defined with regard to the void. In this sense, Zizek too is a materialist, even though he has nothing whatsoever to do with matter (and Badiou's mathematics is in a similar conceptual locale). On the other hand, I do hold intelligibility to be an important aspect of any philosophy, since intelligibility implies the thinkability of truth, or the philosophical proximity of truth and being. This, I think, distinguishes true philosophy from sophism, however defined.

3. The Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation is very cool. The One, as perfect, overflows itself and emits something from itself. That something then turns around and differentiates itself from the One (since the One cannot make differentiations, since it is a simple and immediate One); by this activity the something determines itself as Nous or Intellect (or some other level in other Neoplatonic philosophers). This is the level of intelligibility and forms, as well as being. The One, it can be said, is properly beyond being. Iamblichus even posits an Ineffable layer or entity beyond the One, in order to better speak of that One.
Even if one does not buy the proliferation of levels, or at least the reasons given for this proliferation, one must look upon Neoplatonism with a kind of awe. It accomplished a very delicate, if rationally incomplete, meditation on the concept of worlds or orders of being, something that was rather inchoate in the works of Plato himself.

4. Because transcendent or otherwise ineffable experiences are wholly or partially removed from sayable reality, from linguistic structure, the interpretation or imputation of them within that structure will always be a shaky affair. That mystics should agree on many points is not by any means an obvious necessity to me, and indeed I think we could interpret mystical experience in a far more wide-ranging manner than is usually done. The “similarity” of the accounts of that experience are suspect rather than straightforward corroborations of one another. It all smacks too much of extrinsic linguistic restrictions, of common ways of thinking about worldly problems imprinted from centuries or millenia of philosophical speculation on the one hand, but more important from theological (non-mystical) modes of thought, myth-making, and social cohesion.
It is not that there can be no effable measure of the ineffable. And honestly, most experiences that fall under the rubric of mysticism or the occult are not strictly ineffable like, say, the “Vision of God Face to Face”. But this goes for ordinary experience as well, I suppose: how we theorize the experience does not obviously and directly fall out of that experience itself.
This is, then, a plea for interpretive pluralism with regard to mystical, non-standard, and liminal experiences, until a more clear measure of knowledge of those happenings be found. NOTE: I do not say a clear measure of their truth is lacking, for truth and knowledge are in reality opposites, truth being a hole or exception in knowledge, a process of becoming eternal, whereby one beholds the Forms (or some other such theorization; Badiou's is rather good and clear on this matter).

The Four Worlds: A Brief Philosophical Exploration

"We are assailed by the Image. The Image is real."

By this, one usually means that an appearance is real as appearance, though a yawning gulf may yet lie at its back. Through the undoing of that pedestrian and vulgar form of binary thinking, it is possible to conceive this gulf as itself having real existence. As a real existent, it might follow, this gap has determinants of its own. Size, for example, may be ascribed to the being-appearing gap, or density if one prefers. Not only magnitudes or indications of intensity, but also qualitative distinctions, could be explored, depending on what is being negated in the gap's constitution. 

Let us call an object with this gap a “material” object, consequently subject to the regime of representation. An object with no such gap we shall term an “astral” object, or “imaginal” if one prefers. In this case, the object is directly its own appearing, subject not to representation but to presentation, purely and simply. An astral image, for example, is not a representation of some other thing, but directly is itself. If one likes, it represents or refers directly to itself. Such is the conception of a magician undergoing a vision; the vision is real, and any images of angels or demons seen in the mind's eye directly are those angels and demons.

This is not to say that an astral entity does not have other facets that it is not showing at some moment, only that there is no representation involved, hence the image is real not merely “as image”, but real full stop.

Aside from these two relatively simple registers, there is another that is rather more difficult to explain: the mental. It is perhaps easiest to conceive on the back of the astral, in the form of an example. When one listens to black metal, one does not exactly feel an emotion. Rather, one receives an affective image or series of images (image here is not exactly the right term, but it should suffice). This image, this sensuous but not obviously emotional response to musical extremity, can be meditated and dwelt upon, contemplated until it appears not as a mere image but as a kind of essence. This purified and abstracted “image” is no longer sensuous, but it has been drawn from the sensuous domain of music by the Will or the Intellect. This is an Idea, and it is a mental entity.

A mental entity is a combination of form and force, an abstract system of logic and the force to think through it. It is the highest sense of Mind as conceived by various ancient systems of idealism. It is, in other worlds, a singular world unto itself, effected only by the One that is God. It can be thought, that is inhabited, by the seeker, or rather the seeker can become part of that world. A mental word, for example, does not represent some other thing, but directly is itself (like an astral word), but beyond that, the very criteria for determining what it is are contained in seed form within the word itself. The speaking of the mental word changes reality in profound ways, a force contorting the fabric of the cosmos, even so far as to create an utter interiority separate from the One. Such is the conception of names divine or barbarous as they are chanted in certain contexts sacred or with inverted holiness.

There is, finally, the Causal world. The causal is just that – the cause of other stuff, while not being itself caused. In fact, it can never be effect. It is not only singular like mental entities, but sovereign. It like Laruelle's vision-in-One, or a unilateral duality. It is not unreasonable to term this world “God”.

The causal world acts by overflow, constantly reproducing itself as sovereign as it simultaneously produces the shards of non-being and sends them plunging in to the abyss. These shards of broken divinity can then be taken up into an Idea and used to forge a new God. In philosophical terminology, we might call the shards “exceptions”, the byproducts of formalization, the structural possibilities of diagonalization (in the Cantorian sense) and hence the reconfiguration of the causal (or better, the production of a new causal entity, for why should there be just one?).

Notes on Esoteric Ontology

God is considered irrational simply because Xe is operating according to every possible principle of rationality at the same time, and most of these are mutually contradictory. We consider reality to be inherently mysterious for this reason, that God's reason is many, while we require ours to be one. Many in principles and yet one in being, God is a single Logos causing directly the concrete totality of all Ideas, regardless of their material or imaginal manifestation. God is not the All, since God is lacking in lack itself, that is, in isolation. Individual Ideas are not God, but they do express God, among other things.
 
There is no such thing as nonsense, because everything, whatever else it might express, always expresses its ultimate essence or ground. This essence or ground is either God (in the normal case) or some other singularity of Will (in the case of contingent deification). Language, no matter how apparently absurd, always has an Idea that makes it intelligible, but that Idea might not be readily available in all cases.

Furthermore, however, that intelligibility dictates that the All does exist, though this existence necessarily excludes the exception (which is the principle or possibility of isolate intelligence and hence of contingent deification), much like the Lacanian masculine universal. This All could be rightly termed the Demiurge, from which it is advisable to escape by means of exceptionalization.

Reality breaks itself (self-abstracts) into distinct levels, of which there are 4: causal, mental, astral, and material (in that order). Less Will/Spirit results in higher “density” or concretion; hence the material world has the least Will, is the furthest emanated from God.

God emanates by a process called “speculative overflow”, by which Xe withdraws (tzimtzum) and then flows into the empty space from which Xe withdrew. This activity shatters the body of God (creates the exception). Speculative overflow can also be likened to the Ontological Argument, by which the conceptual distinctions of mind itself surpass their boundaries and are thus real. God overflows Xir own boundaries; God, indeed, is this very act of self-surpassing, which could also be represented by the logical deduction of Xirself.

Hence, all of created reality is the result of speculative overflow, in particular of the shards that fell into the abyss. But the ultimate telos of the Will is to achieve its own speculative overflow, to become a God itself. This is the Will's only pure end; insofar as Will is purified of all its objects, insofar as it becomes akin to an objectless subject, it achieves this end of self-deification.

This is not an idealism, since that is where all is Mind; here, all is Will. The mental world (Briah) is only one sphere of being. Instead of a dualism of mind and body, this is a four-fold dinstinction (or five if you count the abyssal non-being that opens onto a diagonalization procedure and hence to self-deification).

The material world is marked by a profound gap between being and appearing. The astral world, by way of contrast, has no such gap, and hence every astral appearing is directly that being which appears. An astral magic word or holy name is directly what it is said to “represent”, but instead of representing, it is a pure presentation.

The mental world is the infinite extrapolation of the tendency or essence of a thing (the relation of the mental world to the astral and material worlds is still opaque to me at the moment). More than an image or concept as those are usually called, an Idea (an entity of the mental world) is in some sense a world-process in itself or principle of Logos. It is a center of gravity, an interiority of Will. Examples of Ideas might be Aeons or True Selves.

It is through the mental world (through an Idea) that isolation can be accessed (and this must pass through the Sitra Ahra or void of darkness beyond the limits of God).

Will is the stuff of reality; it is not a thing but a process, always a willing.

Not everyone has a soul, but one can get a soul.

The paradox of duality and non-duality may be overcome. The simultaneous duality and non-duality of duality and non-duality can be resolved in favor of one or the other from the interiority of a process: in favor of non-duality when a singularity is dissolved (is this possible?) or in favor of duality (of isolation) when a singularity opens onto diagonal-being (anti-cosmic gnosis).

The New Black/Death Metal: Introduction, Rough Draft

Here is something I have been thinking a bit about: the new black/death metal in particular, but more generally I have been concerned with subtraction, singularity, and so on, with special focus on the originally explicitly non-conceptual (i.e. on the subjectively and implicitly conceptual!). Lots of bullshit wordiness, but it is almost a necessity for me to begin writing anything of substance. I think overall it remains a problem of my inability to grasp audience and determine at what level of complexity I should write (I can never be sufficiently consistent).

* * * * * * * * * * *

From time to time, in the grandiose motions of the heavenly bodies, in strings of painted cards, or, more to the point, in the bones of the old, we may, with no small success, come to know the future. It is thus that in the already-stinking corpse of the deceased, a certain tendency to the abstract and the speculative, that is, to alchemy, points the crooked path to a world-shattering redemption, a final judgment simultaneously birthing a new aeon, or shall we say a new aeon annihilating the old through its mere existence. If the old survives, as it doubtlessly must, it will do so only as a dead man walking, bolstered by the sheer weight of externality. Its innermost being, however, shall be irreparably shattered, its impotent fragments scattered unto eternity. And yet this is no old world-historical task, no metaphysical changing of the guard, no artistic (for it is of art that we speak) succession of the false by the true, no better correspondence and no more adequate representation. For the equinox of the gods of art falls not to the task of the translator, not to the quibbling of the far-removed observer, but to the serpent of light in its utter interiority, its isolate intelligence. The process that is our object, extrapolated to infinity, is therefore something divine, and this divinity retroactively annihilates the fallibility of its own individuation, though it be carried out with the utmost care and reverence. This work, then, will be a preliminary experiment with evental history from a particular point of view, namely that of the infinitely contracted point of singularity constituting the sublimated essence of an entirely subjective type; the roles of alembic and calcinator will be duly played by our principles of intelligibility and formalization, from which we derive the maxim of our alchemical Arte: There is no such thing as nonsense. Let this be a testament, above all, to the Idea, to which our at first entirely sensuous (indeed auditory) subject matter presents a particular challenge, but one which, precisely due to the staggering conceptual distances involved, enables a more perfect demonstration of the labor of the intelligible.

The entire undertaking rests upon an as yet rather vague notion, that of the interior view, or more simply, of the interior. First of all, an interior must be separated from that which lies outside it, its sometimes-relative and sometimes-absolute exterior. This gap might be the product of various operations or functions, different at the very least for the structural apparatus by which they are described, ranging from a set-theoretical operation (Badiou) to a mystical transcendence-within-immanence (various forms of esotericism). Our gap, then, is rather unlike its neighbor in the Lacanian tradition of psychoanalysis, which is a self-contained gap or lack, something that interposes itself between itself and its other (see also Badiou's notion of the void). Our gap is better put in the plural, as gaps, each of which is the result of a contingent but formal-logical and therefore also in a certain sense necessary process of subtraction, a transcendental structure in miniature, or rather a multiplicity of such structures. These gaps may be more or less radical, more or less gappy, and therefore constitute more or less peculiar regions (we will call an absolutely peculiar region by its proper philosophical name, singularity). Essentialization, the ultimate goal of the philosophical study of genre, is in these terms simply an extrapolation of peculiarity to infinity, the production of a singularity and therefore of a wholly internal region, an artistic-cum-philosophical Idea or abstract image that can then be studied with far more concrete interest and effect than could otherwise be possible. To take a genre on its own terms, then – this is our goal.

[What is an interior view?]

With these preliminaries safely out of the way, our subject matter can be better indicated, despite the lack of a proper term with which to distinguish it from its neighbors. This matter is the new black/death metal, a genre exemplary for its uncompromising and unique artistic and therefore philosophical vision. Precisely: we seek the abstract characteristics, in other words the essence, of the new black/death metal – or better, we must speculatively extrapolate, through a process yet to be delineated [speculative overflow? Subtraction? Formalization? Something like that...], the characteristics and hypothetical singularities of the genre. To the skeptic the question could be put: If there were such a thing as a coherent genre or style described by the term “the new black/death metal”, and exemplified by such and such a selection of musical groups, in what would its unique interest lie?

Surely our genre is related to “cavernous death metal”, yet this misses the more sublime and spiritual aspects of the style. And the same can be said for “orthodox black metal”, which misses the more avant-garde and experimental instances; by the same token, terms focusing on the avant-garde miss more primitive and brutal manifestations. None of these pre-existing terms alone capture exactly the proper range of phenomena, and in fact elements of all three (and certainly several others) are to be desired. So, unwieldy though the term may be, “the new black/death metal” is the best one ready-to-hand.

Remembering that we are here assuming “the new black/death metal” to be a coherent and in fact singular genre (or better, singular Idea), we can propose its champions, its exemplars. From “cavernous death metal” comes Portal, Impetuous Ritual, Grave Upheaval, Abyssal, Mitochondrion, Irkallian Oracle, Desolate Shrine, Antediluvian, and so on. From black metal (partially “orthodox”) comes Deathspell Omega, Blut Aus Nord, Aosoth, Vassafor (undeniably the closest thing to “cavernous black metal”!), Nightbringer, Akhlys and so on. Other groups of more uncertain origin and coherence are Howls of Ebb (bizarro death metal), Ulcerate (churning and dissonant technical death metal), and Ævangelist (horror soundtrack meets death metal). These bands constitute, at their most extreme differences, a set of axes or poles (to the exterior eye, it is readily admitted): on the one hand we have the highly technical and complex compositions of Ulcerate, on another the primitive and nigh-incomprehensible darkness of Grave Upheaval. Another differential axis might be character of the spirituality being expressed in the music, for indeed one of the markers of the genre is its deep-seated and terrifying spirituality. This axis might range from the sublime “High” spirituality of Nightbringer of Deathspell Omega to the “Low” or dirty occultism of Howls of Ebb or Portal, to the nihilistic worship of death and destruction by Grave Upheaval (again notable for their sheer extremity) or even Ulcerate (a rather “High” variation on destruction). Obviously, this criterion should deal only with the expression of the music and not primarily with the professed opinions of the musicians themselves.

The above is, as noted, only a preliminary exterior view of the differentiations, the coordinates of our study. We see these groups and their musical compositions from an exterior perspective governed by mediocre and mundane criteria – the use of gradations, no matter how many or how complexly interwoven, is usually a good indicator of this. Throughout the course of the presentation, hopefully as many of these exterior layers as feasible might be shed.

[To be revised/continued...]