11. The North Atlantic Books Incident
12. The Dismantling of the WestPreface (replaced by revised Preface)
The Return of the Tower of Babel:
Birth Pangs of the Aquarian World
Richard Grossinger
“Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” Genesis 11: 9, King James Bible
Table of Contents
Preface
Down the Rabbit Hole
Prologue
9/11/2001 to 11/8/2016 to 1/6/2021
Chapter One: Trumpism
1. The Real Donald Trump, Shapeshifter and Grifter
2. The Dystopian Scoresheet of POTUS 45
3. Crook, Genius, Idiot, Magician, Fool
4. A Strange Energy
Chapter Two: QAnon
1. Millenary Religions
2. The Letter Q
3. From Pizzagate to Pedophilia
4. The Clinton Body Count and Other Dossiers
5. Crisscrossing Conspiracy Theories and Missing Witnesses
6. The Metamorphosis of Pizzagate to QAnon
7. Layers of QAnon
8. Trump’s 5-D Chessboard
9. Guns, Gear, and Hashtags
10. QAnon and Anti-Vaxx
11. Donald Trump as Heyoka Shaman and Lightworker
12. Prankster Anarchy and Quantum Uncertainty
Chapter Three: Cancel Cultures
1. Right and Left Hands of God
2. The Sociology of Religion
3. Sex-Magic Interlude
4. Holy Ground
5. Health Freedom
6. Unsafe Operating Space
7. Race, Gender, and Identity Politics
8. Woke Campuses, Elite Education, and College Debt
9. Hegemonies
10. Punishment, Atonement, and Wetiko
11. The North Atlantic Books Incident
12. The Dismantling of the West
Chapter Four: COVID-19
1. Its Hour Come Round
2. A Statistic for Every Belief System
3. Bat-Vampire Loop
4. Paradigms and Their Shifts
5. Spike Proteins, Graphene Oxides, and Ethics by Default
6. The Vaccine Meme
7. Vaxx Sell and Censorship
8. The Future of the Genome
9. Coronavirus Treatments
10. The Vaccine is Not the Problem with the Vaccine
11. Technocracy: I Owe My Soul to the Company Store
12. The Source and Destiny of COVID-19
Chapter Five: Chaos Magic
1. The Origin of Magic
2. Renaissance Magic
3. The Ascent of Chaos Magic
4. Sigils
5. Egregores
6. Pepe the Frog
7. Donald Trump as Chaos Magician
Chapter Six: Saturnalia
1. Rogue Software
2. Stop the Steal
3. Show Me the Kraken
4. March on the Capitol
5. Saturnalia
6. Lose the Bum!
7. The Eighth Sphere
Chapter Seven: Ukraine
1. Fault Lines
2. The Maidan
3. Holy Russia
4. Putin: Rage, Martyrdom, Folly
5. War
6. The Real Great Reset
Epilogue:
The Big Picture
Endnotes
Preface
Down the Rabbit Hole
The Return of the Tower of Babel is an esoteric inquiry into the birth of the Aquarian Age and current events. I call it “The Return of the Tower of Babel” because Homo sapiens’ current civilization has come to resemble a mythical state of confusion and chatter in which bands and then tribes and then nations of hominids found themselves when encountering other bands with different customs, languages, and agendas. Of course, there was no actual original state of babble; the yammer of tongues and belief systems is archetypal more than historical. However, I propose that the current clutter of fake news, conspiracy theories, and propagandas represents birth pangs of a new genesis.
I call them “birth pangs of a new genesis” rather than “death rattles of a dying order” because I believe that everything that has happened on our world since its inception in a stellar spiral—the stages of creation described in Genesis 1 and 2, Hesiod’s Theogeny, the Finnish Kalevala, Hopi Túwaqachi tales, and countless other ancient and indigenous creation myths as well as the equally mythical Big Bang of astrophysics—is part of the universe’s evolution from one unknown and incomprehensible phase of knowledge, being, manifestation, and awareness to another. In that sense, it is optimistic and positive, even in its negative aspects, because it is a divine exploration of light and its depth, immensity, mystery, and ineluctable shadows. Because it is light—Buddha’s ground luminosity—it will eventually spread in radiance, revelation, and compassion, but not for a long, long, long time.
I call it Aquarian to mark it on an ancient calendar; belief in astrology is optional. All of the zodiac’s signs have their virtues and lesions, but we have come to mark our current precession from a Piscean to an Aquarian world as a breakout from rigid control by, paradigmatic systems to new freedoms of body, mind, soul, god, gender, and sound, though that does not mean that the transition will be pleasant, sunny, or even above water. We carry remnants of Atlantean karma, however we choose to represent or enact “Atlantis” temporally.
Behind all secular or mundane occurrences on physical worlds sits a field of karmic and archetypal forces, expressing themselves in “earthed” elements and conditions. Astronomy, geography, and geology, as sciences as well as lands, are themselves outcomes of energies flowing from subtle planes into denser ones to general spheres and orbits for cosmic evolution. Biology’s two spiraling helices (comprising DNA, RNA, and their messengers and ribosomes) are a quantum channel between etheric and carnal bodies—between soul complexes and their foetally ripened seeds.
Political and social conflicts, economic disparities, and wars are the effects of astral polarity on sublunary zones and are as inescapable as the moon’s tides. That is, the vast astral sphere leans on the physical-etheric realm, imposing its dialectics, dichotomies, secrets, scandals, and general tumult.
Money is a primal psychic phenomenon—from shells, beads, and coins to digitalized reserves and cryptocurrencies—an evolution of runes facilitating energy exchange as well as a symbolic arbiter of value and flow between individuals, communities, and polities.
Weapons are material projections of cords and tangles in our auras—unrealized psychic capacities and ancestral traumas.
Everything I discuss in this book will reflect one or another myth cycle, an attempt to align with a spiritual or metaphysical agency, or a violation of a covenant or shrine. You cannot breach or transgress a sanctified space without first entering it, so in the big picture a transgression is a phase of alignment and alleviation.
Just a few years ago, folks in solidarity or at clash at least knew the terms of their battle. Now alternate facts perturb all realities so that even minor disputes resemble hurricanes with nothing tied down. Yet few recognize the real problem because, like in biblical Babel, the disconnects are being generated many leagues beneath the semantics like from the bottom of a psycholinguistic Pacific or Jovian Sea. That makes the façade of disagreements somewhat moot—ex post facto surf—because you can’t disagree when you can’t ground the source of your disagreement. In the United States alone, polarization is off the rails on climate, race, election formats, health freedom, guns, vaccines, nativism, and parities of basic governance.
Despite imbedded translators and translation programs, we have forgotten how to talk to each other: no comprendo, ne comprends pas, lost in translation. The commons has been drowned in a clatter of weaponized rules, dings, snarks, and petty cyber memes that oblige obedience and cant in the service of one or another tribe, cabal, or deity. The 2020s reprise poet Matthew Arnold’s 1867 “confused alarms of struggle and flight . . . as on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.”1 He had no way of knowing how dark, ignorant, and armed they would become.
The current state of confusion includes an unwillingness to surf meanings, subtexts, and their syntaxes. People would rather sow antimony than synthesize new information and institutions or even enjoy lively company. In a polarized zone, you can’t fight without being turned dialectically against even your own convictions. There’s a reason why Bob Dylan’s joker and thief tried to get each other out of here, while along the watchtower otherworldly entities sent up flares and runes as they tried to optimize our possibility for spiritual freedom.2
The deceptively safe sixties and seventies in the U.S. were supported by cheap gasoline, First-Amendment-guarded seminar suites and cafés, and relaxed, recreational ennui. You could jive and parry without getting shot at, tasered, shamed, ghosted, cancelled, arrested, or starting a race riot. You could talk about climate and culture, identity and politics, superstorms and hyperobjects, stuff that is determining the future of the planet, without being contradicted before you were halfway done. You could complain about how baseball is no longer baseball. You could lounge on a spinning sphere in the nourishment of its six-dimensional day-night star and imagine magic, angels, cabbages, and kings.
Before you declare your allegiance to a sect, party, or belief system and toss this book as blasphemy—wait. Among unheard voices is a greater call in a new planetary dialect. It sounds like Babel because it is re-calibrating what Earth is trying to tell itself—the deeper mystery: Whole Earth in garbled choruses of Gaia mind as Revelation grapples with Apocalypse and photolysis. Despite the grapple and fuss, everyone has a part of the truth, which is why they hold on so tenaciously.
I am reminded of the last century’s Jeremianic balladeers: Barry McGuire wailing “Eve of Destruction,” Bobby Darin chanting “Strange Rain,” Dylan auguring “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall,” Phil Ochs defying, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” then mourning “When I’m Gone” (as well as covering Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”). We’re all Okies, and there are as many burgeoning Muskogees as there are tribes, bands, refugee camps, and arks across the planet.
First let me dispel some preconceptions. This book is not an anti-Trump diatribe. Donald J. is there, to be weighed on the same scales as everything else in the universe, gravity and mass on up (and down). As I scry for his static equilibrium, I have a partisan but not a biased eye.
Nor is this an anti-vaxx book, though I put COVID-19 serums and their memes on the same microbalancer. In fact, one should weigh every medicine, potion, preservative, pesticide, colloid, and lipid that they ingest, spread on crops, or feed to guileless pets, children, and their true selves. Ask: What is their molecular pedigree and etiology? What’s actually in them?
I am not holding a pro-Paris Accord, pro-Glasgow Conference brief either, though I’m glad folks are noticing the movement of glaciers, deserts, water, and firestorms and calling intelligence to counsel. I honor chaos theory, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and homeostatic feedback, too. Original dharma-bum poet Gary Snyder told a Nevada City audience—and I quote him thirdhand—"Mother Nature is a discursive lady, we don’t know what she and her mix of chaos and attractor systems have in store for us. Her magic goes deeper than climate change, floods, butterflies, and sunspots.”
To resign ourselves to mere apocalypse is a plea bargain; we’ve got far more karma to burn.
When I dive into QAnon in Chapter 2, I address it not just as a cult of hooligans, fanatics, and proud nut jobs. I honor the original Q of shamans and bards who initiated our species. My goal is neither to praise nor condemn, just to tell. I do see danger in weaponized facts, governance by conspiracy, and unabashed lying, but I believe that all such blowback has mythological roots as well.
I don’t display my anthropology card often because I didn’t earn it in the trenches of Fourth World fieldwork (I studied Maine fishermen after failing at Hopi shamans), but with QAnon it counts for something: cross-cultural and subcultural perspective. You wouldn’t dismiss a Dakota clown ceremony, Australian Emu dance, or Dogon star myth as delusional bullshit or Babbitt baloney. “Cults” enfold nascent culture and carry encrypted myths.
Likewise, I don’t dis the QAnon creed as balderdash qua disinformation. It erupts from a core at which rogue “tells” are either right in principle or seeded by truth mysteries. In a cosmic cloud, the histrionic and cruel have their reason and position too. Every telekinetic particle does.
Be patient. If you develop road rage, wait for what lies around the bend. As craniosacral founder John Upledger growled at me in the late nineties when I worried that the past life to which he was supposedly regressing me wasn’t real, “Fuck that! Humor me, will you!”
Humor me! To those who want to know my position in advance, where the rubber of my allegiance hits the road of peremptory fact, I’ll go with Rodney King’s momentary burst of heart energy: “Why can’t we all just get along!”
Why can’t we? That’s the question folks keep asking, Egypt after Egypt.
There is something about our era’s rigged threshold of Hobbesian chaos that portends an unlikely turning point, a realignment of forces in a cliffhanging ploy to get humanity through its shadow, a wetiko disease diagnosed by “Awaken in the Dream” shaman Paul Levy. It is time we awakened to our alchemical antidotes and medicines of shadow-work. That won’t be accomplished by therapy sessions, meditation retreats, or peace accords; it needs a millennial songline.
That’s the problem I encountered in 2019 at Hollyhock’s annual summer conference for gaming the future, before the pandemic changed its terms. Hollyhock is a Canadian retreat center on Cortes Island, British Columbia, similar to Big Sur’s Esalen. An unexamined Buddhist dystopian overlay of identity politics caused compassion practices, therapeutic exercises, and cultural theory to shear multiple ways, leading to a revival of apocalypticism, despite all the singing, dancing, virtue-signaling, and heart sharing.
“Climate” was our existential theme, sighted from multiple perspectives, beginning with the scary science—what was already “baked in,” as keynote presenter Karen Mahon, roots in Canadian government and Greenpeace Canada, put it, "in the next ten years—and the curve only exponentializes from there.”
We are going to cook, little by little and then by not so little.
After the politics came a medley of psychological and spiritual approaches and a mix of ceremonies and activisms. But we lacked a rain dance or even rain-dance faith. Though Cortes’ forest was damp, I felt as though I was on parched sci-fi Mars.
Panels, plenary sessions, and breakout groups took their various leads from medical entheogens, energy medicines, spiritual plant allies, gender morphing, emerging women in India, rescuing children from the slave trade, communications with the afterlife, and ways of grieving. Iraq War vets and ex-military narrated healing pilgrimages from suicidal despair to chanting icaros with shamans in the Peruvian rain forest.
For a closing ritual, our Ugandan leader choreographed a giant spiraling, chanting snake dance of the whole group. Two days later, I noticed how greater numbers of humans snaked similarly through security at the Vancouver airport, without cohesion, affirmation, or a concession of shared humanity. The airport helix was a shamanic snake too, but it worshipped tribal clash and asymmetric death pictures.
A billion-plus conferences across modernity has created an illusion that we are making progress by talk—yak, yak, yak, yak. Yet matters are as they have always been: land, space, matter, energy, and mortality—crucibles of creatures and systems. Power points, manifestos, and accords, each compelling in its moment, dissipate overnight or on return flights. Western eloquence palls before the masting youth of Thailand and Ghana, riding scooters through town, lighting trash fires. They, not we, will determine the planet’s future.
Our litany began among territorial bands, then metastasized through hot and cold wars of gods, religions, political and economic systems, land and property entitlements. We have still not settled original matters of ownership, territory, gender, power, privilege, or totem, so how can we address communism versus capitalism, Allah versus Mammon, China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine, techno-systems and ecosystems?
Despite our epidemic secularism, we are being witnessed and guided by ghosts, ancestors, and angels from not just beyond science’s camouflage universe but the hidden altar of All That Is—all of samsara and all of nirvana. That’s the big picture. The path to awakening and species unity is by abyss and bedlam—no escape hatch or conscientious objection allowed. At its end is Tibetan rigpa, our innate joy and radiance, it’s who we are. The way is not clear, even to those who train to be clear—nor is it clear even how to dead-reckon mere survival, personal and collective. Absolute freedoms and forever chemicals vie in the biosphere with buck-stops-here tipping-point stewardship.
Given the battlefields and diasporas that birthed our species in the last Ice Age, there had to be such a moment. Tomorrow’s axiom is blinding as a proximal star. If you look at it directly, it cannot be seen.
*
My first published work was Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which I wrote mostly in 1966. In the time since, I have written more than forty books, among them The Long Body of the Dream; The Slag of Creation; Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church: Planet Medicine: From Stone Age Shamanism to Post-Industrial Healing; The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos; Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity; The Bardo of Waking Life: The New York Mets: Myth, Ethnography, and Subtext; Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness; and Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. I agree with those who have said that forty is too many. I have spent a disproportion of my allotted lifetime on writing (and watching ballgames), but I also think that you have to pass the hours creatively, joyfully, and safely. I wrote as a morning meditation, as prayer to the day-star, as an alternative to bullshitting and gossiping, and as parallel play with my wife Lindy Hough (also a writer), from our 1960s Selectrics in Ann Arbor to our 2020s laptops in California and Maine.
As for games, I wanted my teams to win because then they got to keep playing and evolving, as I evolved with them. I followed fiercely and cared for a reason not cited in the sports pages: time itself, a narrative that, when it ends, is death: death of the season, death of oneself or a part of oneself. Teams never return with the same roster, nor do families. As a pro star, I forget whom, once remarked, “If it’s the ultimate game, why do they play it again next year?”
From a portable radio at Camp Chipinaw to a satellite dish on Blake Street and later internet subscriptions for my teams, I listened to or watched countless “ultimate games” in the climactic rapture of my nature. I massaged their numbers in the papers, online, and in monkey mind. I conducted daily prayers to a totemic Ka’aba faintly resembling the one at Mecca.3
*
In fall 2020, I began writing a book about Trumpism, chaos magic, and weaponized information. Donald the First was still in high office, though he was about to lose a November plebiscite that he didn’t concede as a fair match. He would set up court in exile at Mar-a-Lago, though not before attempting an American Coup (as in American Sniper, American Kids, and American Pie).
“Chaos Magic” was my original context—as a driver behind a flamboyant mountebank’s unforeseen ascent. POTUS 45 was a payoff of shamanic rituals and psychic forces outside ordinary politics.
In February 2020 in my longtime role as a writer and publisher, I began to curate a new imprint, Sacred Planet Books, at Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, which oversees the largest current archive of Earth’s spiritual traditions. Apart from my book-acquiring, I was asked to give editorial feedback to John Michael Greer, an Inner Traditions author of a forthcoming title on Donald Trump and chaos magic.
Chaos magic was at the outer fringe of my knowledge base. I was well versed in Aleister Crowley and Thelemite ceremonies—the ritual projection of will. I read Magick in Theory and Practice in college in the 1960s when I was too callow to realize than Crowley had written an occult version of my physics textbook.
I was more nuanced in the shamanic genealogy of magic. See any of six editions of my book Planet Medicine in which I tracked the topic from late 1970s through the early 2000s. My prior (1975) doctorate in anthropology began in 1966 as an inquiry into myth and religion inspired by Winnebago tricksters, Maori wairuas (spirit ghosts), Ndembu voodoo masters, Hopi kachinas, and Navaho pourers of sacred sand. Once I got through my thesis defense and seven years of teaching college, I gave up on academic politics and continued the inquiry on my own.
More recently, I studied grounding cords, protection roses, change-history, and aura reading with Sethian attorney John Friedlander (he has a degree from Harvard Law School that he earned during years in which he also sat with Jane Roberts while she channeled interdimensional entity Seth).4 I was a bit cloudy on the chaos brand per se. I knew that it came from a mix of instruments and incantations on seventies Camden High Street, London, among other pre-Beatles locales.
In the late 1960s, close friends of mine collaborated with underground film-maker Kenneth Anger and musician Mick Jagger on an early chaos-magic rock video, Invocation of my Demon Brother, before either term was officially coined. Rockers then believed that the magic was in the music and the music in them. This pre-“chaote” fusion of camp culture and pop sorcery took place under the auspices of consciousness-altering drugs and incipient punk tropes.
That presaged by fifty years the link between Donald Trump and ritual voodoo. For Team Trump, chaos magic wasn’t a deck of punk-voodoo tropes, geeky techniques, or ceremonies near the echelon of Nazi satanic rituals in Bavarian forests; it was a borrowed Julius Evola stunt from the playbook of intellectual hitman Steve Bannon whose “occult” credentials ran from Naval Warfare officer in the Pacific fleet to Seinfeld promoter, Biosphere 2 manager, and Breitbart media hen.
For masonic templar Greer, however, it was a real ceremony, and it had worked.
Another Inner Traditions author, Gary Lachman, wrote an earlier text on traditional magic in the context of Donald Trump and state power. He included Vladimir Putin’s Russian rendition, which led to a follow-up Inner Traditions title on occult traditions in Holy Russia. Gary was my tutor on politics and magic, and his work is quoted throughout my sections on chaos magic and Trump.
The Greer manuscript was published in late 2020 as The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power. Inner Traditions catalogued it this way: “John Michael Greer goes beyond superficial memes and extreme partisanship to reveal the magical and occult forces that spawned the unexpected presidential victory of an elderly real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star and which continue to drive the deepening divide that is now the defining characteristic of American society.”
That p.r. proved prophetic. Magical and occult forces were sowing new realities.
Greer, as a freemason, went beneath Trumpian sigils into ancestral runes, but his trowel was different from mine. An enthusiast of post-modern populism and its origin in national spiritualist revivals, he was an overt cheerleader for the decline and fall of the capitalist West, which spurred his love-hate affair with the King. He was a bit like an academy historian rooting for a cultural revolution that might send him to Siberia.
In October after working with Greer, I decided to take my own shot at the topic. I first read two of Greer’s other sources, the afore-mentioned Italian philosopher Julius Evola and Romanian historian Ioan Couliano.* By then, I was less focused on the fusion of magic and politics, a gloomy, enervating proposition—Lachman’s book is aptly entitled Dark Star Rising—and more on the role of evocation and ritual in awakening a sleeping giant capable of healing civilizational wounds.
I am not a doomsayer or nihilist, though I dabble in the apocalyptic tropes of our time. My old friend Chuck Stein—we go back to freshman year of high school—proposed recently, “We are an invasive species.” He proffered that even though he is a Buddhist practitioner and devotee of reincarnated lama Namkhai Norbu—meaning that he is a student of the dharma, purity, and emptiness—so I take his words to heart, though he is also subject to capitalism’s inadvertent capitalization of its own maudlin self-critiques.
Once I began writing about politics and chaos magic, I found a companion topic: the coronaviral pandemic. Trump and COVID-19 were joined at the short hairs from the moment the virus arrived by jet from Mainland China in California and slipped past customs. It burgeoned through the 2020 Presidential campaign, overriding other topics as it overrode medical systems and supply chains.
In pandemic spring (2020), I collated an Inner Traditions anthology, The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical. For Babel, I rewrote my opening and closing transmissions into a chapter. As I followed the virus through 2021 into 2022, the chapter grew and morphed, and continues to morph. It now is a book within a book.
I introduce vax and anti-vaxx under QAnon in Chapter Two, a harbinger of my fuller analysis in Chapter Four. Go to both places for the full imbroglio. I can’t sort it—no one can—but I capture some of its tiers of contradictory criteria. The fact is, our materialistically oriented society is in no position to issue verdicts on either nano or subtle realms—and viruses, vaccines, and vital energies encompass both.
In excavating COVID, I tried to lay down an objective lesson plan, though I have biases regarding the nature of disease and cure going back to the first edition of Planet Medicine in 1978. In my interrogation of non-Western and alternative healing systems, I side with energy medicine, vitalism, and the esoteric (or etheric) basis of all illnesses and their cures. I believe that natural immunity, etheric vibrations, and embryogenic fields are senior to the most advanced technological and pharmaceutical interventions. We exist not only as molecular algorithms under Darwinian constraints but because a vital-energy vortex touched down here. As the anthroposophists have it, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and, together, they recapitulate cosmogeny. The egg recapitulates nature’s evolution and together they recapitulate the cosmos.
The vital force was identified by healers long before the Common Era: Greek physicians with their hot compresses and geometry of vital energy, followers of the Chinese Yellow Emperor with his roots, ground shells, and thorns, and the Cree shaman (and his First Nations colleagues with their spirit allies, vision quests, and medicine bundles). It is still our once and future clinic, though the medical establishment has lieged itself to computer science and biotech. A key theme of this book is that the takeover of medicine by a profit-based technocracy—of agriculture too—literally trumps Left and Right, vax and anti-vaxx.
I didn’t want to plunge my readers directly into Trumpworld—it’s a La Brea tar pit as well as surefire brawl between fans and detractors. (Amazing, isn’t it, that Kellyanne and George Conway can raise sane children together? But such is Babel.) Yet nailing the orange shapeshifter—an international obsession and cottage industry—is critical to sounding where we are as a nation, world, and genome. The dude didn’t drop in from Nowhere, though he remade its palindrome Erewhon. He is Earth’s collective golem or “ghola,” to borrow Frank Herbert’s vogue noun from a sci-fi Dune world. A ghola is an artificial human constructed from the DNA of a dead individual, a far more salient danger in the world of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and CRISPR technology than when Herbert invented one of Earth’s great alt-planets.
Despite his defeats, the King in Orange is not leaving any time soon. He is as immune to removal as any vampire or malefic madonna. My take on him is different from the rest—yeah, everyone says that!—but I hope that you read past my opening scenery to more substantial oracles and enigmas. Mary Stark, my literary executor, was the first witness to my dilemma. She wrote:
The early part of your book is a bit confusing because it sounds like current material, but a lot pertains to a past presidency and even the lead-up to that—almost like a slightly outdated diary of musings/observations. Those observations are still pertinent, though one gets caught up trying to figure if your chapter is an up-to-the-minute reading of our current predicaments or more of a retrospective.
Trumpian drama plays that way. We don’t know if it’s in our rear view and receding or if, as comedian Chris Rock hauntingly put it between Election 2016 and Inauguration 2017, we’re still in line to board the roller-coaster. We may still be in line.
I didn’t want an outdated diary, so I decided to introduce the King in Orange with a personal preamble.
Then comes Act One: Entry of Trump, troupe and trope, cluttered cast and scenery. The thirteen percent of the U.S. electorate who voted for both Barack Obama and the Donald were among the confounded in Babel.
As I delved further into Trump and chaos magic, I encountered its deeper driver: QAnon. I separated its occult elements and synchromysticism from its agitprop politics, deferring full chaos magic till I laid firmer groundwork. QAnon is the larger entity. Trump was its harbinger.
In mapping conspiracy theories, I am neither a supporter and apologist nor a debunker. Instead, I interrogate them culturally, psychologically, and metaphysically in framing of (1) other cargo cults, (2) the alphabetic origins of the letter Q, and (3) the trendy QAnon Trio: Transgression, Conspiracy Theory, and Synchromysticism.
Pedophilia and satyriasis are Q’s one-two punch of “transgressions,” inseparable from pathologies of eros and gender throughout human history. Because I wrote about sexuality in a different, unpublished manuscript, Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, I grafted some of its passages into an ensuing chapter on identity politics where I continued to deconstruct sex magic.
Most books on QAnon either celebrate it as a new sect of evangelical Christianity or mock, denigrate, and demonize it as propagandized Right Wing twaddle. The pro-QAnon selection includes titles like QAnon: The Awakening Begins (by Anthony Tolle) and the anonymous QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening. Countless related titles have been banned from the internet.
Conversely, Amazon.com’s monstropedia heralds the negative side, starring the umbrella QAnon: Everything You Need to Know About the World’s Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory by James A. Beverley, and the pull-no-punches Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump. For Operation Mindfuck, the publisher offered a quote from Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen, “Voltaire suggested that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. . . . Robert Guffey’s razor-sharp postings illuminate how a collage of Shaver mysteries, Discordian prankster politics, and recreational conspiracy theory played out as a dissociative American fugue.” That’s a fair response to the low end of the Q emanation.
The high-end reality is thornier and more complex. Rolling Stone columnist Eric Levai described a Burning-Man-like miscegenation of millenarians, merry pranksters, neo-Nazis, evangelicals, libertarians, Hells Angels, hooligans, and meta-MAGA heads at a modern “Renaissance fair.” Levai writes:
On a beautiful California afternoon, people screamed, “Lock (Fauci) up!”, danced to bizarre QAnon pop anthems. Political candidates manned booths, while people played carnival games. Someone dressed as Batman posed for photographs, and the director of “Plandemic” was praised as a hero. The “People’s Convoy”—the motorists who did slow laps around Washington D.C. to protest covid policies — rolled in and set up shop, blaring their horns until my ears were bleeding. Everything felt strangely . . . boring, an absolute mismatch with the violent froth of extremist ideology, conspiracy, and aggression blaring from the stage.5
His subtext is that the marching band of Q opens brilliantly and terrifyingly but wears quickly like a sofa in a brothel.
The August 15, 2021 Sunday New York Times Book Review praised Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko under a heading that reflects the generic progressive-media view of the creed: “The Dangers of QAnon: An alarming movement that is growing in power.” Critic Seyward Darby japes, among multiple banderillas, that “QAnon offers people a false sense of agency and community in an uncertain world. Believers collectively analyze ‘crumbs’ of cryptic information. . . . When they reach conclusions, followers feel smart, superior, and united.”
That’s the collective diagnosis of educated intellectuals and literati, my original home team. Darby laments that the authors “don’t discuss how racial identity may have informed the participants’ [e.g., stormers of the Capitol] ‘psychological distress’ over ‘changing culture and eroding social norms.’” Darby added, “The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were overwhelmingly white.”6
Condescension by identity politics misses the hermeneutics as well as actual depth and danger of Q.
In Chapter Three, “Cancel Cultures,” I continue to track millenary aspects of QAnon, which leads to my deconstruction of the Democratic Party’s anti-spiritual cosmology and concomitant loss of Kansas (and much of the American heartland and exurbs). At the same time, I critiqued the Right’s religiosity and American exceptionalism. Yet its circumstantial alliance with alternative medicines—it is more truly a sponsor of commercialized Christmas, nativism, and the rights of the unborn—gives it a ring of health freedom along with a strategically rowdy political incorrectness. Throw in Bannon’s meme magic, calamitous Iraq and Libyan wars, inglorious Somalian, Syrian, and Afghan exits, inflation, food and housing shortages, opiates and fentanyl, and you have a Uranian recipe for revivalism.
Through 2016 I have voted straight Democratic since coming of age, but neither side is now my home team. I am oddly more welcome these days in in the redneck camp than my own. Though neither Regnery nor HarperOne would publish this book, Regnery could publish it, whereas Harper and Penguin can’t even look at it. Exploring QAnon with neutral curiosity and analyzing mass vaccination as anything other than the lone authorized path out of the COVID-19 pandemic are nonstarters for the former free press.
Numerous holistic practitioners, energy healers and lay shamans have likewise found themselves in the company of belief systems that most of them would have deemed opprobrious and shameful just a few years ago. New dialectics have led to crisscrossed energies, unlikely bedfellows, and mismatched grails.
“The Plan,” “The Storm,” or “The Great Awakening,” as envisioned by QAnon and its affiliate militias and oath keepers, may turn out to be far more enigmatic than either guns or roses when game time arrives. Players and rules are changing sides and parties by the second and meme. Where will you be when it counts?
Having introduced exiled medicine men and women in Chapter Two (QAnon), I follow them through “Cancel Cultures.” On a downward spiral, ritual magic is allied with fascism and a Nazi death cult. On the upswing, it points to a revival of natural religion and medicine to counter five hundred years of materialist reductionism. This is a crucial dialectic in the chapter on COVID and its vaccines when I discuss the rise of a technocracy.
Whichever way QAnon’s apocalyptic utopianism goes, Dylan’s “times they are a-changin’” wheel is still in spin and is going to be for a while.
As Chapter Three’s barometer, I used a conceit by which Rabbi Michael Lerner distinguished two different “hands” of Yahweh: mercy and power. Each of them have partisans on both the political Left and political Right. I go beyond Michael’s 2004 analysis, taking into account dialogues that he and I had subsequently and leading to the current gridlock of identity politics and cancel culture, which has left American campuses, corporations, and free speech in tatters, and not just American.
This chapter has a personal arc. My wife, Lindy Hough, and I were cancel-cultured from our own publishing company after fifty-five years of developing it from a sixties college journal (Io) through phases of growth, life support, revival, and transformation into an indy mind-body-spirit imprint (North Atlantic Books). It was taken over, I tend to say (in symbo shorthand), by zealots, opportunists, and language police, though there were only five or six of them, so the categories overlap. They were straight out of a Gen X punk-immaculacy, anti-intellectual wrecking crew though, like everyone else, they had an alt-narrative in which they were good guys and liberators. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Martin Neimöller’s “first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. . . .” pretty much describes the silent majority of staff, board members, and fellow Berkeley publishers. After all, Lindy and I had white privilege—felony enough.
I thought of our press as a magical, initiatory vessel; it took us a lifetime and much of our own money and donated time to create: a nonprofit organization based on a coalition of indigenous and avant-garde arts and sciences. The occupiers converted it into a counter-initiatory boutique. In the process, they vandalized fifty-plus years of careful archiving with race-and-gender censorship while meretriciously—most of them are white—displaying their own pronoun preferences (almost all straight he’s and she’s)—with “they-them-theirses” like their home-team emblems, waving fake tomahawks and Black Lives Matter banners, too.
We had no excuse. We hired them and gave them jobs and salaries and didn’t think “lord of the flies”, Jack and Piggy, at the time. But in a world in which every tenth human is a sociopath, charm and “shining on” gets mistaken for emotional intelligence and camaraderie.
They used virtue-signaling to camouflage old-fashioned robbery— identity theft and home invasion, taking what isn’t yours. They wanted our brand and cashflow, money and reputation they didn’t earn, so they used neo-woke race theory, the sort of tactic, writ large, that helped elect Donald Trump and squander a Democratic majority, but what did they care? They were never after social justice, just its cover.
In the “Cancel Culture” chapter, I propose that a lot of the new race theory and social-justice stuff that has become legion in the neo-liberal West in the 2020s—listen carefully because this is a subtle point that I have to put on a Columbo-and-the-Dream-Team thinking cap to get right—are actually revivalist expressions of White Power. White bureaucrats, academics, and ambitious posturers ally with Black, and sometimes Native American, chicano, and other minority bureaucrats and opportunists, none of whom care about jazz, hip-hop, reggae, street art, world fusion, Basquiat, Baraka, medicine bundles, emu totems, Stew, self-discovery, and indigenous or magical arts. Instead together they create the myth of critical race theory, White fragility, White appropriation, and the 1619 Project’s correction whereby they legitimize and valorize each other in order to keep tuitions, grants, salaries and other doles flowing or, in our case, use a social-justice, inclusion meme, combined with ageism, to take over an organization and steal its bank accounts and endowment.
This dude and Tucker Carlson’s Great Replacement lady should go to the prom or partner in crime together because they provide the grease for each other’s scams.
Not that that there isn’t systemic racism too—and plenty of it. I discuss that as well, but as a curable miasm and opportunity, not as judgment or false-flag red meat for the oh-so-woke.
On top of it, our crew created their own replacement history in which newcomers were told that Lindy and I invented our nonprofit (Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences) to steal money from Native Americans. By 2019, pathological lying wasn’t considered pathological, or even lying (if in the service of salvation politics). We see its equivalents now throughout the world of liberal arts, liberal politics, and progressive culture. Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger were nothing special. We met as Smith and Amherst students in 1963 three weeks before the JFK assassination, and our long collaboration became mid-to-late roadside carrion in the Trump era.
For a while, I regretted my mistakes, which were legion, like don't hire people who don't support your mission. I have since taken in the bigger picture, that we are in a time when energy is drawing its antipode—the more radical the energy, the more fascist and anti-Christ the backlash.
The kidnapping of our “child” is why I was starting a new imprint at the invitation of Inner Traditions’ publisher, Ehud Sperling. Prior to that, my West Coast staff had viewed his Vermont press as the enemy. Decades prior, missed by me at the time, the San Francisco Bay Area’s brief Whole Earth Catalogue renaissance was hijacked by redneck hippies, book bundlers, and tech capitalists. They were too young to have been part of the counterculture that spawned Bookpeople, Shambhala, and the communes of northern Vermont. They wanted to make bucks, not ecocities. They had no pretense to Whole Earth anything.
“We”—and I include myself and Lindy—joined them and became the bad guys, cutting the decks unfairly with our author and copublisher colleagues, taking more than we deserved because manipulable databases and software made it simple and blind. From non-MBA backgrounds, we were happy just to start a successful business, so we adopted community standards, not realizing that we would get old and be hoisted on the same petard by the next Cultural Revolution.
Two of Ehud’s initial comments on the matter—“Racist, sexist; they’ve seen nothing like two angry Jews!” and “My pronoun is motherfucker!” spoke to everything I hadn’t ever wanted to be affiliated with, on any of its counts. I was, proudly (to name-drop and virtue-signal) Ishmael Reed’s buddy and partner in hoodoo and Barbary Coast Distribution in the 1960s and ’70s; a reader at Andy Hope’s 1976 Tlingit-Eskimo powwow in Anchorage; a long-time pro-Palestinian, anti-Seder Jew; and the adoring father of a film-maker and novelist sometimes dubbed the “Queen of Queer”—but it was everything that had become necessary for my survival. Our daughter wrote at the time:
It really is just boggling to me how this entire company that you and mommy made could be suddenly not yours anymore. I guess it has to do with the structure, that the board essentially owns it. And I guess you knew it wasn’t “yours” in the way that I, your child, would think it was. But I really am just stunned. You actually seem to be taking it well, I guess with something this awful various survival strategies come to the fore. Of course it’s not piercing like it is for you, but because I literally grew up inside the company, lived with it my whole childhood, have never not known it to be my parent’s company and proud of it—it is a loss for me too.
I am so sorry.
love,
mj
Ehud himself had started in Israel (to which his near forebears had fled from 1930s Berlin), but he came of age and adolescence in the projects of Washington Heights and Queens. He was no Zionist “white dude.” Another comment of his spoke to the real issue: “What’s race except the Indy 500?” My chapter likewise challenges race as bait-and-switch for class and lifestyle. We’re all red blood and white bones beneath a climatologically mutating ectoderm.
In Chapter Four, “COVID-19,” my goal was to get under ideological façades and excavate the political, cultural, linguistic, and epidemiological woof of a mutating pandemic with its also-fungible culture-bound responses. In The Corona Transmissions, I cast COVID-19 as a psychopomp—a facilitator of bio-diversity and planetary wake-up call. That was a bit of utopian embellishment, but I stand by it, from Kristin Flyntz’s “Stop. Just stop. / It is no longer a request. It is a mandate. /We will help you.” to Emily Shurr’s “NO ONE CAN DO THIS ALONE. We need each other. / And the good news is—we HAVE each other!”The current “COVID” chapter, expanded through 2021 and 2022, is designed to the bumps and curves in the virus’ ongoing epidemiology and epistemology.
I have tried to unravel various memes packing them, notably the vaunted V-word. While I present opposing views on mass vaccination, the fact is, from either plank any airspace to the opposition is heresy. A documentary filmmaker I know visited his native Berkeley in late 2021 and attempted to gift a copy of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health to a childhood pal. “He was ashamed to be seen looking at it,” my friend told me. “He hesitated to touch and open it as if it was contaminated with poison or the virus itself. But when we went into another room and he actually read some of it, he was glad to have it—and without a paper trail. He left with it under his arm.”
At the same time, anti-censorship City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco refused to carry or special-order the book.
On the other side, many anti-vaxx folks have treated vaccination like a Left Wing tattoo rather than a scientific litmus.
Given the political, ecological, and economic plight of our species, the virus-vaccine brouhaha is a bait-and-switch, distracting us from far deadlier plagues, asteroids, and hyperobjects on the near horizon.
My cardinal topic, “Chaos Magic,” is set three chapters past its debut in Trumpism. That lets me derive it from four table setters: Trumpism, QAnon, identity politics, and scientia (the prescientific fusion of magic and science). My chapter opens with a history of shamanism, telekinesis, and street (or forest) magic, then goes to the advent of the chaos brand, which I track by two principal agencies: sigils and egregores. These lead to the King in Orange with his MAGA sigil and “Stop the Steal” egregore. As these toggle into autonomous tropes, they trump Trump himself.
In the following chapter, I interrogate Stop the Steal and briefly consider E.T. intercession in the 2020 election, if only as a glass to look through at more elusive krakens. I end at January Sixth’s Saturnalia, the March on the Capitol.
But then Vladimir Putin sent the Red Army into Ukraine in an orgy of clan murder, urban demolition, and petty revenge that will take centuries to sort and assimilate. Aiming missiles at markets, hospitals, theaters, and apartment complexes brings Trumpian vanity and Soviet authoritarianism to their shared consummation. QAnon, COVID, and identity politics didn’t evaporate with the invasion of Ukraine; they evolved, so I added a seventh chapter on Eurasian fault lines, Holy Russia, Putin, and The Great Reset.
I consign all these hexes, poxes, and flaps to the entry of Aquarius and the Year of the Ox, leading us from Trumpism, Putinism, Xiism, and Bidenism—are they finally that different?—to subtle bodies, angelic guides, and energy dragons.
*
Early on, I named this book Reading Gateway Cards: Opening the 2020 Portal. Since I was writing in the context of Inner Traditions, I put my inquiries into a psychospiritual container that included the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, animal consciousnesses, cryptids (like sasquatches and sea monsters,) psychoids (like leprechauns and undines), UFOs, bardo realms, and telekinesis. To my editorial colleagues, the container proved more appetizing than its Trumpian and Q contents, so I stripped it off and turned it into a companion book: Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Cosmogenesis from the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs (Inner Traditions, 2022). The two texts converge at roughly the same prognosis: Earth, its solar system, galaxy, and supergalaxy have moved within the cosmos to a new zone of space, which is meaning to awaken us from a trance longer than recorded history.
For my other gateways, see Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Chapter One: “Planet” (1. Big Bang, 2. Ice, 3. Climate); Chapter Two: “Genome” (1. Cells, 2. Microbiomes); Chapter Three: Dreamings (1. Butterfly Dreaming, 2. Aboriginal Dreamings, 3. Octopus and Crow Dreamings, 4. COVID Dream Animals); Chapter Four: Meta-Science (1. Fields, 2. Quantum Mechanics, 3. Life Among Stars); Chapter Five: Unidentified Flying Guides (1. UFOs, 2. Meeting David Wilcock at Noniland, 3. Psychoids); Chapter Six: Incarnations (1. Afterlives, 2. Ghosts, 3. The Scam of the Being of Light, 4. Reincarnations, 5. Time); Chapter Seven: Practices (1. Phenomena and Phenomenology, 2. Buddhism, 3. Exercises, 4. Initiations); Epilogue: Camouflage Cosmoses, Callings, and Codes (1. Technocracy, 2. The God Code, 3. Bandwidths).
Endnotes
1. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” in Dover Beach and Other Poems, p. 87.
2. Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” Columbia Records, 1967.
3. Baseball material adapted from Out of Babylon, Book Four: Universal Forces of Light, unpublished.
4. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth.
5. Eric Levai, “QAnon, the ‘People’s Convoy,’ and Neo-Nazis Mingle at L.A. Anti-Vaxx Rally,” Rolling Stone online, April 16, 2022.
6. Seyward Darby, “The Dangers of QAnon,” The New York Times, Book Review, August 15, 2021, p.21.
*Readers may not know that Couliano was murdered in 1991, presumably by his homeland Secret Police, in a bathroom stall at the University of Chicago (where he taught)—still a Chicago PD cold case.
Down the Rabbit Hole
The Return of the Tower of Babel is an esoteric inquiry into the birth of the Aquarian Age and current events. I call it “The Return of the Tower of Babel” because Homo sapiens’ current civilization has come to resemble a mythical state of confusion and chatter in which bands and then tribes and then nations of hominids found themselves when encountering other bands, tribes, and nations with different customs, languages, and agendas. Of course, there was no actual original state of babble; the yammer of tongues and belief systems is archetypal more than historical. However, I propose that the current clutter of fake news, conspiracy theories, and propagandas represents birth pangs of a coming Aquarian phase of consciousness.
I treat them as “birth pangs of a new genesis” rather than “death rattles of a dying order” because I believe that everything that has happened on our world since its inception in a stellar spiral—stages of creation described in Genesis 1 and 2, Hesiod’s Theogeny, the Finnish Kalevala, Hopi Túwaqachi tales, and countless other ancient and indigenous creation myths (as well as the equally mythical Big Bang of astrophysics)—is part of the universe’s evolution from one unknown and incomprehensible phase of knowledge, being, manifestation, awareness, and spiritual freedom, to another. In that sense, it is optimistic and positive, even in its negative aspects, because it is a divine exploration of light and its depth, its immensity, its mystery, and ineluctable transparency and shadows. Because it is light—Buddha’s ground luminosity—it will eventually extend in radiance, revelation, and compassion, but not for a long, long, long time.
I call it Aquarian to mark it on a traditionary calendar—belief in astrology is optional. All of the zodiac’s signs have their virtues and lesions, but we tend to mark our current precession from a Piscean to an Aquarian world as a breakout from rigid control by, paradigmatic systems to freedoms of body, mind, soul, god, gender, and sound, though that does not mean that the transition will be pleasant, sunny, or even above water. We carry remnants of Atlantean karma, however we choose to represent or enact “Atlantis” temporally. Like Superman’s Kypton, it was a civilization run amok in geoengineered transhumanism and synthetic biology.
Behind all secular or mundane occurrences on physical worlds sits a field of karmic and archetypal forces, “earthing” themselves in periodic elements and their properties and conditions. Astronomy, geography, and geology, as sciences as well as landscapes, are themselves outcomes of energies flowing from subtle planes into denser ones to general spheres and spiral orbits for cosmic evolution. Biology’s two spiraling helices (comprising DNA, RNA, and their messengers, transfer stations, and ribosomes) are a quantum channel between etheric and carnal bodies—between soul complexes and their foetally ripened seeds on a 3-D plane.
Political and social conflicts, economic disparities, and wars are the down-diimensional effects of astral polarity on sublunary zones and are asinescapable as the moon’s tides. That is, the vast astral sphere leans on the physical-etheric realm, imposing its dialectics, dichotomies, secrets, scandals, and general tumult.
Money is a primal psychic phenomenon—from shells, beads, and coins to digitalized reserves and cryptocurrencies—an evolution of runes facilitating energy exchange as well as a symbolic arbiter of value and flow among individuals, communities, and polities.
Weapons are material projections of cords and tangles in our auras—unrealized psychic capacities, voodoo attacks, and ancestral traumas.
Everything I discuss in this book will reflect one or another dimensional download or myth cycle, an attempt to align with a spiritual or metaphysical agency, or a violation of a covenant or shrine. You cannot breach or transgress a sanctified ground without first entering it, so in the big picture a transgression is a phase of alignment and alleviation.
Despite imbedded translators and translation programs, we have forgotten how to talk to each other: no comprendo, ne comprends pas, lost in translation. Just a few years ago, folks in solidarity or at clash at least knew the terms of their battle. Now alternate facts perturb all realities so that even minor disputes resemble hurricanes with nothing tied down. Yet few recognize the real problem because, as in biblical Babel, the disconnects are being generated many leagues beneath the semantics like from the bottom of a psycholinguistic Pacific or Jovian Sea. That makes the façade of wrangles somewhat moot—ex post facto surf—because you can’t disagree when you can’t anchor the source of your disagreement. In the United States alone, polarization is off the rails on climate, race, election formats, health freedom, guns, vaccines, nativism, and parities of basic governance.
The commons has been drowned in a clatter of weaponized rules, dings, snarks, and petty cyber memes that oblige obedience and cant in the service of one or another tribe, cabal, or deity. The 2020s reprise poet Matthew Arnold’s 1867 “confused alarms of struggle and flight . . . as on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night.”1 He had no way of knowing how dark, ignorant, and armed they would become.
The state of confusion includes an unwillingness to shift meanings, subtexts, and syntaxes. People would rather sow antimony than synthesize new information and institutions or even enjoy lively company. In a polarized zone, you can’t fight without being turned dialectically against your own convictions. There’s a reason why Bob Dylan’s joker and thief tried to get each other out of here, while along the watchtower otherworldly entities sent up runes and flares as they tried to optimize our possibility for spiritual freedom.2
The deceptively safe sixties and seventies in the U.S. were supported by cheap gasoline, First-Amendment-protected seminar rooms and cafés, and relaxed, recreational ennui. You could jive and parry without getting shot at, tasered, shamed, ghosted, cancelled, arrested, or starting a race riot. You could talk about climate and culture, identity and politics, superstorms and hyperobjects, stuff that is determining the future of our planet, without being contradicted before you had formed a thought You could complain about how baseball is no longer baseball. You could lounge on a spinning sphere in the nourishment of a six-dimensional day-night star and imagine magic, angels, cabbages, and kings.
Before you declare your allegiance to a sect, party, or belief system and toss this book as blasphemy—wait. Among unheard voices is a higher call in a new planetary dialect. It sounds like Babel because it is re-calibrating what Earth is trying to tell itself—the deeper mystery: Whole Earth in garbled choruses of Gaia mind as Revelation and photolysis grapples with Apocalypse. and decay Despite the tug and fuss, everyone has a piece of the truth, which is why they hold on so tenaciously.
I am reminded of the last century’s Jeremianic balladeers: Barry McGuire pelting “Eve of Destruction,” Bobby Darin chanting “Strange Rain,” Dylan auguring “A Hard Rain is Going to Fall,” Phil Ochs defying, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” then mourning “When I’m Gone” (as well as covering Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee”). We’re all Okies, and there are as many burgeoning Muskogees as there are tribes, bands, refugee camps, and arks across the planet.
First let me dispel some preconceptions. This book is not an anti-Trump diatribe. Donald J. is there, to be weighed on the same scales as everything else in the universe, gravity and mass on up (and down). As I scry for his static equilibrium, I have a partisan but not a biased eye.
Nor is this an anti-vaxx book, though I put COVID-19 serums and their memes on the same microbalancer. In fact, one should weigh every medicine, potion, preservative, pesticide, colloid, and lipid that they ingest, spread on crops, or feed to guileless pets, children, and their true selves. Ask: What is their molecular pedigree and etiology? What’s actually in them?
I am not holding a pro-Paris Accord, pro-Glasgow Conference brief either, though I’m glad folks are noticing the movement of glaciers, deserts, water, and firestorms and calling intelligence to counsel. I honor chaos theory, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and homeostatic feedback, too. Original dharma-bum poet Gary Snyder told a Nevada City audience—and I quote him thirdhand—"Mother Nature is a discursive lady, we don’t know what she and her mix of chaos and attractor systems have in store for us. Her magic goes deeper than climate change, floods, butterflies, and sunspots.”
To resign ourselves to mere apocalypse is a plea bargain; we’ve got far more karma to burn.
When I dive into QAnon in Chapter 2, I address it not just as a cult of hooligans, fanatics, and proud nut jobs. I honor the original Q of the shamans and bards who initiated our species. My goal is neither to huzzah nor condemn, just to tell. I do see danger in weaponized facts, governance by conspiracy, and unabashed lying, but I believe that all such blowback has mythological roots as well.
I don’t display my anthropology card often because I didn’t earn it in the trenches of Fourth World fieldwork (I studied Maine fishermen after failing at Hopi shamans), but with QAnon it counts for something: cross-cultural and subcultural perspective. You wouldn’t dismiss a Dakota clown ceremony, Australian Emu dance, or Dogon star myth as delusional bullshit or Babbitt baloney. “Cults” enfold nascent culture and carry encrypted myths.
Likewise, I don’t dis the QAnon creed as balderdash qua disinformation. It diverges from a core at which rogue “tells” are either right in principle or seeded by truth mysteries. In a cosmic cloud, the histrionic and cruel have their reason and position too. Every telekinetic particle and thoughtform does.
Be patient. If you develop road rage, wait for what lies around the next bend. As craniosacral founder John Upledger growled at me in the late nineties when I worried that the past life to which he was supposedly regressing me wasn’t real, “Fuck that! Humor me, will you!”
Humor me! To those who want to know my position in advance, where the rubber of my allegiance hits the road of peremptory fact, I’ll go with Rodney King’s momentary burst of heart energy: “Why can’t we all just get along!”
Why can’t we? That’s the question folks keep asking, Egypt after Egypt.
There is something about our era’s rigged threshold of Hobbesian chaos that portends an unlikely turning point, a realignment of forces in a cliffhanging ploy to get humanity through its shadow, the wetiko disease diagnosed by “Awaken in the Dream” shaman Paul Levy. It is time we awakened to the antidotes and medicines of shadow-work. That won’t be accomplished by therapy sessions, meditation retreats, or peace accords; it needs an actual songline.
That’s the problem I encountered in 2019 at Hollyhock’s annual summer conference for gaming the future, before the pandemic changed its terms. Hollyhock is a Canadian retreat center on Cortes Island, British Columbia, similar to Big Sur’s Esalen. The goal was to imagine a healthy civilizational transition, taking castrophism into accout while also considering hope, the last hummingbird or dragon-fairy in Pandora’s jar. But an unexamined Buddhist dystopian overlay of identity politics and competitive zazens led compassion practices, therapeutic exercises, and cultural theory to shear multiple ways, leading to a revival of apocalypticism, despite all the singing, dancing, virtue-signaling, tonglen Reiki, and heart sharing.
“Climate” was our existential theme, sighted from multiple perspectives, beginning with the scary science—what was already “baked in,” as keynote presenter Karen Mahon, roots in Canadian government and Greenpeace Canada, put it, "in the next ten years—and the curve only exponentializes from there.”
We are going to cook, little by little and then by not so little.
After the politics came a medley of psychological and spiritual approaches and a mix of ceremonies and activisms. But we lacked a rain dance or even rain-dance faith. Though Cortes’ forest was damp, I felt as though I was on parched sci-fi Mars.
Panels, plenary sessions, and breakout groups took their various leads from medical entheogens, energy medicines, spiritual plant allies, gender morphing, emerging women in India, rescuing children from the slave trade, communications with the afterlife, and ways of grieving. Iraq War vets and ex-military narrated healing pilgrimages from suicidal despair to chanting icaros with shamans in the Peruvian rain forest—the cream of current sacred activism.
For a closing ritual, our Ugandan leader choreographed a giant spiraling, chanting snake dance of the whole group. Two days later, I noticed how greater numbers of humans snaked similarly through security at the Vancouver airport, without cohesion, affirmation, or a concession of shared humanity. The airport helix was a shamanic snake too, but it worshipped tribal clash and asymmetric death pictures.
A billion-plus conferences across modernity has created an illusion that we are making progress by talk—yak, yak, yak, yak. Yet matters are as they have always been: land, space, matter, energy, and mortality—crucibles of creatures and systems. Power points, manifestos, and accords, each compelling in its moment, dissipate overnight or on return flights. Western eloquence palls before the masting youth of Thailand and Ghana, riding scooters through town, lighting trash fires. They, not we, will determine the planet’s future.
Homo sapiens’ litany began among territorial bands, then metastasized through hot and cold wars of gods, religions, political and economic systems, land and property entitlements. We have still not settled original matters of ownership, territory, gender, power, privilege, or totem, so how can we address communism versus capitalism, Allah versus Mammon, China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine, techno-systems and ecosystems?
Despite our epidemic secularism, we are being witnessed and guided by ghosts, ancestors, and angels from not just beyond science’s camouflage universe but the hidden altar of All That Is—all of samsara and all of nirvana. That’s the real big picture. The path to awakening and species unity leads through hell realms and bedlam—no escape hatch or conscientious objection allowed. At its end is Tibetan rigpa, our innate joy and radiance, it’s who we are. The way is not clear, even to those who train to be clear—nor is it clear even how to dead-reckon basic survival, personal and collective. Absolute freedoms and forever chemicals vie in the biosphere for buck-stops-here stewardship.
Given the battlefields and diasporas that birthed our species in the last Ice Age, there had to be such a moment. Tomorrow’s axiom is blinding as a proximal star. If you look at it directly, it cannot be seen.
*
I have been a writer since age sixteen, junior year of high school. My first published work was Solar Journal: Oecological Sections, which I composed mostly in 1966. In the time since, I have written more than forty books, among them The Long Body of the Dream; The Slag of Creation; Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church: Planet Medicine: From Stone Age Shamanism to Post-Industrial Healing; The Night Sky: Soul and Cosmos; Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity; The Bardo of Waking Life: The New York Mets: Myth, Ethnography, and Subtext; Dark Pool of Light: Reality and Consciousness; and Bottoming Out the Universe: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing. I agree with those who have said that forty is too many. I have spent a disproportion of my allotted lifetime on writing (and watching ballgames), but I think that you have to pass the hours creatively, joyfully, and safely. I wrote as a morning meditation, a prayer to the day-star; as an alternative to endlesslybullshitting and gossiping ; and as parallel play with my wife Lindy Hough (also a writer), from our 1960s Selectrics in Ann Arbor to our 2020s laptops in Northern California and Downeast Maine.
As for games, I wanted my teams to win because then they got to keep playing and evolving, as I evolved with them. I followed fiercely and cared for a reason not cited in the sports pages: time itself, a narrative that, when it ends, is death: death of a season, death of oneself or a part of oneself. Teams never return with the same roster, nor do families. As a pro star, I forget whom, remarked, “If it’s the ultimate game, why do they play it again next year?”
From a portable radio at Camp Chipinaw to a satellite dish on Blake Street and later internet subscriptions for my teams, I listened to or watched countless “ultimate games” in the climactic rapture of my nature. I massaged their numbers in the papers, online, and in monkey mind. I conducted daily prayers to a totemic Ka’aba faintly resembling the one at Mecca.3
*
In fall 2020, I began writing a book about Trumpism, chaos magic, and weaponized information. Donald the First was still in high office, though he was about to lose a November plebiscite that he didn’t concede as a fair match. He would set up court in exile at Mar-a-Lago, though not before attempting an American Coup (as in American Sniper, American Kids, and American Pie).
“Chaos Magic” was my original context—as a driver behind a flamboyant mountebank’s unforeseen ascent. POTUS 45 was a payoff of shamanic rituals and psychic forces outside ordinary politics.
In February 2020 in my longtime role as a writer and publisher, I began to curate a new imprint, Sacred Planet Books, at Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, which oversees the largest current archive of Earth’s spiritual traditions. Apart from my book-acquiring, I was asked to give editorial feedback to John Michael Greer, an Inner Traditions author of a forthcoming title on Donald Trump and chaos magic.
Chaos magic was at the outer fringe of my knowledge base. I was well versed in Aleister Crowley and Thelemite ceremonies—the ritual projection of will. I read Magick in Theory and Practice in college in the 1960s when I was too callow to realize than Crowley had written an occult version of my physics textbook.
I was more nuanced in the shamanic genealogy of magic. See any of six editions of my book Planet Medicine in which I tracked the topic from late 1970s through the early 2000s. My prior (1975) doctorate in anthropology began in 1966 as an inquiry into myth and religion inspired by Winnebago tricksters, Maori wairuas (spirit ghosts), Ndembu voodoo masters, Hopi kachinas, and Navaho pourers of sacred sand. Once I got through my thesis defense and put in seven years of teaching college, I gave up on academic politics and continued the inquiry on my own.
More recently, I studied grounding cords, protection roses, change-history, and aura reading with Sethian attorney John Friedlander (he has a degree from Harvard Law School that he earned during years in which he also sat with Jane Roberts while she channeled interdimensional entity Seth).4 I was a bit cloudy on the chaos brand per se. I knew that it came from a mix of instruments and incantations on seventies Camden High Street, London, among other pre-Beatles locales.
In the late 1960s, close friends of mine collaborated with underground film-maker Kenneth Anger and musician Mick Jagger on an early chaos-magic rock video, Invocation of my Demon Brother, before either term was officially coined. Rockers then believed that the magic was in the music and the music in them. This pre-“chaote” fusion of camp culture and pop sorcery took place under the auspices of consciousness-altering drugs and incipient punk tropes.
That presaged by fifty years the link between Donald Trump and ritual voodoo. For Team Trump, chaos magic wasn’t a deck of punk-voodoo tropes, geeky techniques, or ceremonies at the echelon of Nazi satanic rituals in Bavarian forests; it was a borrowed Julius Evola stunt from the playbook of intellectual hitman Steve Bannon whose “occult” credentials ran from Naval Warfare officer in the Pacific fleet to Seinfeld promoter, Biosphere 2 manager, and Breitbart media hen.
For masonic templar Greer, however, it was a real ceremony, and it had worked.
Another Inner Traditions author, Gary Lachman, wrote an earlier text on traditional magic in the context of Donald Trump and state power. He included Vladimir Putin’s Russian rendition, which led to a follow-up Inner Traditions title on occult traditions in Holy Russia. Gary was my tutor on politics and magic, and his work is quoted throughout my sections on chaos magic and Trump.
The Greer manuscript was published in late 2020 as The King in Orange: The Magical and Occult Roots of Political Power. Inner Traditions catalogued it this way: “John Michael Greer goes beyond superficial memes and extreme partisanship to reveal the magical and occult forces that spawned the unexpected presidential victory of an elderly real-estate mogul turned reality-TV star and which continue to drive the deepening divide that is now the defining characteristic of American society.”
That p.r. proved prophetic. Magical and occult forces were sowing new realities.
Greer, as a freemason, went beneath Trumpian sigils into ancestral runes, but his trowel was different from mine. An enthusiast of post-modern populism and its origin in national spiritualist revivals, he was an overt cheerleader for the decline and fall of the capitalist West, which spurred his love-hate affair with the King. He was a bit like an academy historian rooting for a cultural revolution that might send him to Siberia.
In October after working with Greer, I decided to take my own shot at the topic. I first read two of Greer’s other sources, the afore-mentioned Italian philosopher Julius Evola and Romanian historian Ioan Couliano.* By then, I was less focused on the fusion of magic and politics, a gloomy, enervating proposition—Lachman’s book is aptly entitled Dark Star Rising—and more on the role of evocation and ritual in awakening a sleeping giant capable of healing civilizational wounds.
I am not a doomsayer or nihilist, though I dabble in the apocalyptic tropes of our time. My old friend Chuck Stein—we go back to freshman year of high school—proposed recently, “We are an invasive species.” He proffered that even though he is a Buddhist practitioner and devotee of reincarnated lama Namkhai Norbu—meaning that he is a student of the dharma, purity, and emptiness—so I take his words to heart, though he is also subject to capitalism’s inadvertent capitalization of its own maudlin self-critiques.
Once I began writing about politics and chaos magic, I found a companion topic: the coronaviral pandemic. Trump and COVID-19 were joined at the short hairs from the moment the virus arrived by jet from Mainland China in California and slipped past customs. It burgeoned through the 2020 Presidential campaign, overriding other topics as it overrode medical systems and supply chains.
In pandemic spring (2020), I collated an Inner Traditions anthology, The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical. For Babel, I rewrote my opening and closing transmissions into a chapter. As I followed the virus through 2021 into 2022, the chapter grew and morphed, and continues to morph. It now is a book within a book.
I introduce vax and anti-vaxx under QAnon in Chapter Two, a harbinger of my fuller analysis in Chapter Four. Go to both places for the imbroglio. I can’t sort it—no one can—but I capture some of its tiers of contradictory criteria. The fact is, our materialistically oriented society is in no position to issue verdicts on either nano or subtle realms—and viruses, vaccines, and vital energies cache both.
In excavating COVID, I tried to lay down an objective lesson plan, though I have biases regarding the nature of disease and cure going back to the first edition of Planet Medicine in 1978. In my interrogation of non-Western and alternative healing systems, I side with energy medicine, vitalism, and the esoteric (or etheric) basis of all illnesses and their cures. I believe that natural immunity, etheric vibrations, and embryogenic fields are senior to the most advanced technological and pharmaceutical interventions. We exist not only as molecular algorithms under Darwinian constraints but because a vital-energy vortex touched down here. As the anthroposophists have it, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny and, together, they recapitulate cosmogeny. The egg recapitulates nature’s evolution and together they recapitulate the cosmos. That sort of energy underwrote the conversion of molecules to compounds, chemicals, and cells and then instigated cells to organize in membranes, tissues, and matrices. I covered this territory in depth in both Bottoming Out the Universe and Dreamtimes and Thoughtform.
The vital force was identified by healers long before the Common Era; these included Greek physicians with their hot compresses and geometry of vital energy, followers of the Chinese Yellow Emperor with his roots, ground shells, and thorns, and the Cree shaman (and his First Nations colleagues) with their spirit allies, vision quests, and medicine bundles). It is still our once and future clinic, though the medical establishment has lieged itself to computer science and biotech. A key theme of this book is that the takeover of medicine by a profit-based technocracy—of agriculture and energy too—literally trumps Left and Right, vax and anti-vaxx.
I didn’t want to plunge my readers directly into Trumpworld—it’s a La Brea tar pit as well as surefire brawl between fans and detractors. (Amazing, isn’t it, that Kellyanne and George Conway can raise sane children together? But such is Babel.) Yet nailing the orange shapeshifter—an international obsession and cottage industry—is critical to sounding where we are as a nation, world, and genome. The dude didn’t drop in from Nowhere, though he remade its palindrome Erewhon. He is Earth’s collective golem or “ghola,” to borrow Frank Herbert’s vogue noun from a sci-fi Dune world. A ghola is an artificial human constructed from the DNA of a dead individual, a far more salient danger in the world of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and CRISPR technology than when Herbert invented one of Earth’s great alt-planets.
Despite his defeats, the King in Orange is not leaving any time soon. He is as immune to removal as any vampire or malefic madonna. My take on him is different from the rest—yeah, everyone says that!—but I hope that you read past my opening scenery to more substantial oracles and enigmas. Mary Stark, my literary executor, was the first witness to my dilemma. She wrote:
The early part of your book is a bit confusing because it sounds like current material, but a lot pertains to a past presidency and even the lead-up to that—almost like a slightly outdated diary of musings/observations. Those observations are still pertinent, though one gets caught up trying to figure if your chapter is an up-to-the-minute reading of our current predicaments or more of a retrospective.
Trumpian drama plays that way. We don’t know if it’s in our rear view and receding or if, as comedian Chris Rock hauntingly put it between Election 2016 and Inauguration 2017, we’re still in line to board the roller-coaster. We may still be in line.
I didn’t want an outdated diary, so I decided to introduce the King in Orange with a personal preamble. That’s my prologue, a quick, choppy time-machine ride from 9/11 through the election of Donald Trump to COVID-19 and the march on the Capitol.
Then comes Act One: Entry of Trump, troupe and trope, cluttered cast and scenery. The thirteen percent of the U.S. electorate who voted for both Barack Obama and the Donald were among the confounded in Babel.
As I delved further into Trump and chaos magic, I encountered its deeper driver: QAnon. I separated its occult elements and synchromysticism from its agitprop politics, deferring full chaos magic till I laid firmer groundwork. QAnon is the larger entity. Trump was its harbinger.
In mapping conspiracy theories, I am neither a supporter and apologist nor a debunker. Instead, I interrogate them culturally, psychologically, and metaphysically in framing of (1) other cargo cults, (2) the alphabetic origins of the letter Q, and (3) the trendy QAnon Trio: Transgression, Conspiracy Theory, and Synchromysticism.
Pedophilia and satyriasis are Q’s one-two punch of “transgressions,” inseparable from pathologies of eros and gender throughout human history. Because I wrote about sexuality in a different, unpublished manuscript, Episodes in Disguise of a Marriage, I grafted some of its passages into an ensuing chapter on identity politics where I continued to deconstruct sex magic.
Most books on QAnon either celebrate it as a new sect of evangelical Christianity or mock, denigrate, and demonize it as propagandized Right Wing twaddle. The pro-QAnon selection includes titles like QAnon: The Awakening Begins (by Anthony Tolle) and the anonymous QAnon: An Invitation to the Great Awakening. Countless related titles have been banned from the internet.
Conversely, Amazon.com’s monstropedia heralds the negative side, starring the umbrella QAnon: Everything You Need to Know About the World’s Most Dangerous Conspiracy Theory by James A. Beverley, and the pull-no-punches Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump. For Operation Mindfuck, the publisher offered a quote from Alan Moore, author of V for Vendetta and Watchmen, “Voltaire suggested that those who can make us believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities. . . . Robert Guffey’s razor-sharp postings illuminate how a collage of Shaver mysteries, Discordian prankster politics, and recreational conspiracy theory played out as a dissociative American fugue.” That’s a fair response to the low end of the Q emanation.
The high-end reality is thornier and more complex. Rolling Stone columnist Eric Levai described a Burning-Man-like miscegenation of millenarians, merry pranksters, neo-Nazis, evangelicals, libertarians, Hells Angels, hooligans, and meta-MAGA heads at a modern “Renaissance fair.” Levai writes:
On a beautiful California afternoon, people screamed, “Lock (Fauci) up!”, danced to bizarre QAnon pop anthems. Political candidates manned booths, while people played carnival games. Someone dressed as Batman posed for photographs, and the director of “Plandemic” was praised as a hero. The “People’s Convoy”—the motorists who did slow laps around Washington D.C. to protest covid policies — rolled in and set up shop, blaring their horns until my ears were bleeding. Everything felt strangely . . . boring, an absolute mismatch with the violent froth of extremist ideology, conspiracy, and aggression blaring from the stage.5
His subtext is that the marching band of “Q” opens brilliantly and terrifyingly but wears quickly like a sofa in a brothel.
The August 15, 2021 Sunday New York Times Book Review praised Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko under a heading that reflects the generic progressive-media view of the creed: “The Dangers of QAnon: An alarming movement that is growing in power.” Critic Seyward Darby japes, among multiple banderillas, that “QAnon offers people a false sense of agency and community in an uncertain world. Believers collectively analyze ‘crumbs’ of cryptic information. . . . When they reach conclusions, followers feel smart, superior, and united.”
That’s the collective diagnosis of educated intellectuals and literati, my original home team. Darby laments that the authors “don’t discuss how racial identity may have informed the participants’ [e.g., stormers of the Capitol] ‘psychological distress’ over ‘changing culture and eroding social norms.’” Darby added, “The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were overwhelmingly white.”6
Condescension by identity politics misses the hermeneutics as well as actual depth and danger of Q.
In Chapter Three, “Cancel Cultures,” I continue to track millenary aspects of QAnon, which leads to my deconstruction of the Democratic Party’s anti-spiritual cosmology and concomitant loss of Kansas (and much of the American heartland and exurbs). At the same time, I critiqued the Right’s religiosity and American exceptionalism. Yet its circumstantial alliance with alternative medicines—it is more truly a sponsor of commercialized Christmas, nativism, and the rights of the unborn—gives it a ring of health freedom along with a strategically rowdy political incorrectness. Throw in Bannon’s meme magic, calamitous Iraq and Libyan wars, inglorious Somalian, Syrian, and Afghan exits, inflation, food and housing shortages, opiates and fentanyl, and you have the Uranian recipe for revivalism.
Through 2016 I have voted straight Democratic since coming of age, but neither side is now my home team. I am oddly more welcome these days in in the redneck camp than my own. Though neither Regnery nor HarperOne would publish this book, Regnery could publish it, whereas Harper and Penguin can’t even look at it. Exploring QAnon with neutral curiosity and analyzing mass vaccination as anything other than the lone authorized path out of the COVID-19 pandemic are nonstarters for the former free press.
Numerous holistic practitioners, energy healers and lay shamans have likewise found themselves in the company of belief systems that most of them would have deemed opprobrious and shameful just a few years ago. New dialectics have led to cross-hexed energies, unlikely bedfellows, and mismatched grails.
“The Plan,” “The Storm,” or “The Great Awakening,” as envisioned by QAnon and its affiliate militias and oath keepers, may turn out to be far more enigmatic than either guns or roses when game time arrives. Players and rules are changing sides and parties by the second and meme. Where will you be when it counts?
Having introduced exiled medicine men and women in Chapter Two (QAnon), I follow them through “Cancel Cultures.” On a downward spiral, ritual magic is allied with fascism and a Nazi death cult. On the upswing, it points to a revival of natural religion and medicine to counter five hundred years of materialist reductionism. This is a crucial dialectic in the chapter on COVID and its vaccines when I discuss the rise of a technocracy.
Whichever way QAnon’s apocalyptic utopianism goes, Dylan’s “times they are a-changin’” wheel is still in spin and is going to be for a while.
As Chapter Three’s barometer, I used a conceit by which Rabbi Michael Lerner distinguished two different “hands” of Yahweh: mercy and power. Each of them have partisans on both the political Left and political Right. I go beyond Michael’s 2004 analysis, taking into account dialogues that he and I had subsequently and leading to the current gridlock of identity politics and cancel culture, which has left American campuses, corporations, and free speech in tatters, and not just American.
This chapter has a personal arc. My wife, Lindy Hough, and I were cancel-cultured from our own publishing company after fifty-five years of developing it from a sixties college journal (Io) through phases of growth, life support, revival, and transformation into an indy mind-body-spirit imprint (North Atlantic Books). It was taken over, I tend to say (in symbo shorthand), by zealots, opportunists, and language police, though there were only five or six of them, so the categories overlap. They were straight out of a Gen X punk-immaculacy, anti-intellectual wrecking crew though, like everyone else, they had an alt-narrative in which they were good guys and liberators. Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” and Martin Neimöller’s “first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out. . . .” pretty much describes the silent majority of staff, board members, and fellow Berkeley publishers. After all, Lindy and I had white privilege—felony enough.
I thought of our press as a magical, initiatory vessel; it took us a lifetime and much of our own money and donated time to create: a nonprofit organization based on a coalition of indigenous and avant-garde arts and sciences. The occupiers converted it into a counter-initiatory boutique. In the process, they vandalized fifty-plus years of careful archiving with race-and-gender censorship while meretriciously—most of them are white—displaying their own pronoun preferences (almost all of them straight “he’s” and “she’s”)—with “they-them-theirses” like home-team emblems, waving fake tomahawks and Black Lives Matter banners, too.
We had no excuse. We hired them and gave them jobs and salaries and didn’t think “lord of the flies,” Jack and Piggy, at the time. But in a world in which every tenth human is a sociopath and pathological liar, charm and “shining on” can get mistaken for emotional intelligence and camaraderie.
They used their virtue-signaling to camouflage old-fashioned robbery— identity theft and home invasion, taking what isn’t yours. They wanted our brand and cashflow, money and reputation they didn’t earn, so they used neo-woke race theory, the sort of tactic, writ large, that helped elect Donald Trump and squander a Democratic majority, but what did they care? They were never after social justice, just a cover.
In the “Cancel Culture” chapter, I propose that a lot of the new race theory and social-justice cant that has become legion in the neo-liberal West in the 2020s—listen carefully because this is a subtle point that I have to put on a Columbo-and-Dream-Team thinking cap to get right—are actually revivalist expressions of White Power. White bureaucrats, academics, and aspirational posturers ally with Black, and sometimes Native American, chicano, and other minority bureaucrats and opportunists, none of whom care about indigenous aesthetics and inspirations, the realms of jazz, hip-hop, reggae, street art, world fusion, Basquiat, Baraka, medicine bundles, emu totems, Stew, self-discovery, and indigenous or magical arts. Instead, together, they create the myth of critical race theory, White fragility, White appropriation, and the 1619 Project whereby they legitimize and valorize each other in order to keep tuitions, grants, salaries, royalties, and other doles flowing or, in our case, use a social-justice, inclusion meme, combined with ageism, to take over an organization and steal its bank accounts and endowment.
This woke dude and Tucker Carlson’s Great Replacement lady should go to the prom together or partner in crime because they provide the grease and griddle for each other’s scams.
Not that that there isn’t systemic racism—and plenty of it. I discuss that as well, but as a curable miasm and imaginal opportunity, not as penal judgment or false-flag red meat for the oh-so-woke.
On top of it, our crew created their own replacement history: newcomers were told that Lindy and I invented our nonprofit (Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences) to steal money from Native Americans. By 2019, pathological lying wasn’t considered pathological, or even lying (if in the service of salvation politics). We see its equivalents now throughout the world of liberal arts, liberal politics, and progressive culture. Lindy Hough and Richard Grossinger were nothing special. We met as Smith and Amherst students in 1963 three weeks before the JFK assassination, and our long collaboration became mid-to-late roadside carrion in the Trump era.
For a while, I regretted my mistakes, which were legion, like don't hire people who don't support your mission. I have since taken in the bigger picture, that we are in a time when energy is drawing its antipode—the more radical the energy, the more fascist and anti-Christ the backlash.
The kidnapping of our “child” is why I was starting a new imprint at the invitation of Inner Traditions’ publisher, Ehud Sperling. Prior to that, my West Coast staff had viewed his Vermont press as the enemy. Decades before, missed by me at the time, the San Francisco Bay Area’s brief Whole Earth Catalogue renaissance was hijacked by redneck hippies, book bundlers, and tech capitalists. They were too young to have been part of the counterculture that spawned Bookpeople, Shambhala, and the communes of northern Vermont. They wanted to make bucks, not ecocities. They had no pretense to Whole Earth anything.
“We”—and I include myself and Lindy—joined them and became the bad guys, cutting the decks unfairly with our author and copublisher colleagues, taking more than we deserved because manipulable databases and software made it simple and blind. From non-MBA backgrounds, we were happy just to start a successful business, so we adopted community standards, not realizing that we would get old and be hoisted on the same petard by the next Cultural Revolution.
Two of Ehud’s initial comments on the matter—“Racist, sexist; they’ve seen nothing like two angry Jews!” and “My pronoun is motherfucker!” spoke to everything I hadn’t ever wanted to be affiliated with, on any of its counts. I was, proudly (to name-drop and virtue-signal) Ishmael Reed’s buddy and partner in hoodoo and Barbary Coast Distribution in the 1960s and ’70s; a reader at Andy Hope’s 1976 Tlingit-Eskimo powwow in Anchorage; a long-time pro-Palestinian, anti-Seder Jew; and the adoring father of a film-maker and novelist sometimes dubbed the “Queen of Queer”—but it was everything that had become necessary for my survival. Our daughter wrote at the time:
It really is just boggling to me how this entire company that you and mommy made could be suddenly not yours anymore. I guess it has to do with the structure, that the board essentially owns it. And I guess you knew it wasn’t “yours” in the way that I, your child, would think it was. But I really am just stunned. You actually seem to be taking it well, I guess with something this awful various survival strategies come to the fore. Of course it’s not piercing like it is for you, but because I literally grew up inside the company, lived with it my whole childhood, have never not known it to be my parent’s company and proud of it—it is a loss for me too.
I am so sorry.
love,
mj
Ehud himself had started in Israel (to which his near forebears had fled from 1930s Berlin), but he came of age and adolescence in the projects of Washington Heights and Queens. He was no Zionist “white dude.” Another comment of his spoke to the real issue: “What’s race except the Indy 500?” My chapter likewise challenges race as bait-and-switch for class and lifestyle. We’re all red blood and white bones beneath a climatologically mutating ectoderm.
In Chapter Four, “COVID-19,” my goal was to get under ideological façades and excavate the political, cultural, linguistic, and epidemiological woof of a mutating pandemic with its also-fungible culture-bound responses. In The Corona Transmissions, I cast COVID-19 as a psychopomp—a facilitator of bio-diversity and planetary wake-up call. That was a bit of utopian embellishment, but I stand by it, from Kristin Flyntz’s “Stop. Just stop. / It is no longer a request. It is a mandate. /We will help you.” to Emily Shurr’s “NO ONE CAN DO THIS ALONE. We need each other. / And the good news is—we HAVE each other!”The current “COVID” chapter, expanded through 2021 and 2022, is designed to the bumps and curves in the virus’ ongoing epidemiology and epistemology.
I have tried to unravel various memes packing them, notably the vaunted V-word. While I present opposing views on mass vaccination, the fact is, from either plank any airspace to the opposition is heresy. A documentary filmmaker I know visited his native Berkeley in late 2021 and attempted to gift a copy of The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health to a childhood pal. “He was ashamed to be seen looking at it,” my friend told me. “He hesitated to touch and open it as if it was contaminated with poison or the virus itself. But when we went into another room and he actually read some of it, he was glad to have it—and without a paper trail. He left with it under his arm.”
At the same time, anti-censorship City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco refused to carry or special-order the book.
On the other side, many anti-vaxx folks have treated vaccination like a Left Wing tattoo rather than a scientific litmus.
Given the political, ecological, and economic plight of our species, the virus-vaccine brouhaha is a bait-and-switch, distracting us from far deadlier plagues, asteroids, and hyperobjects on the near horizon.
My cardinal topic, “Chaos Magic,” is set three chapters past its debut in Trumpism. That lets me derive it from four table setters: Trumpism, QAnon, identity politics, and scientia (the prescientific fusion of magic and science). My chapter opens with a history of shamanism, telekinesis, and street (or forest) magic, then goes to the advent of the chaos brand, which I track by two principal agencies: sigils and egregores. These lead to the King in Orange with his MAGA sigil and “Stop the Steal” egregore. As these toggle into autonomous tropes, they trump Trump himself.
In the following chapter, I interrogate Stop the Steal and briefly consider E.T. intercession in the 2020 election, if only as a glass to look through at more elusive krakens. I end at January Sixth’s Saturnalia, the March on the Capitol.
But then Vladimir Putin sent the Red Army into Ukraine in an orgy of clan murder, urban demolition, and petty revenge that will take centuries to sort and assimilate. Aiming missiles at markets, hospitals, theaters, and apartment complexes brings Trumpian vanity and Soviet authoritarianism to their shared consummation. QAnon, COVID, and identity politics didn’t evaporate with the invasion of Ukraine; they evolved, so I added a seventh chapter on Eurasian fault lines, Holy Russia, Putin, and The Great Reset.
I consign all these hexes, poxes, and flaps to the entry of Aquarius and the Year of the Ox, leading us from Trumpism, Putinism, Xiism, and Bidenism—are they finally that different?—to subtle bodies, angelic guides, and energy dragons.
*
Early on, I named this book Reading Gateway Cards: Opening the 2020 Portal. Since I was writing in the context of Inner Traditions, I put my inquiries into a psychospiritual container that included the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, animal consciousnesses, cryptids (like sasquatches and sea monsters,) psychoids (like leprechauns and undines), UFOs, bardo realms, and telekinesis. To my editorial colleagues, the container proved more appetizing than its Trumpian and Q contents, so I stripped it off and turned it into a companion book: Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Cosmogenesis from the Big Bang to Octopus and Crow Intelligence to UFOs (Inner Traditions, 2022). The two texts converge at roughly the same prognosis: Earth, its solar system, galaxy, and supergalaxy have moved within the cosmos to a new zone of space, which is meaning to awaken us from a trance longer than recorded history.
For my other gateways, see Dreamtimes and Thoughtforms: Chapter One: “Planet” (1. Big Bang, 2. Ice, 3. Climate); Chapter Two: “Genome” (1. Cells, 2. Microbiomes); Chapter Three: Dreamings (1. Butterfly Dreaming, 2. Aboriginal Dreamings, 3. Octopus and Crow Dreamings, 4. COVID Dream Animals); Chapter Four: Meta-Science (1. Fields, 2. Quantum Mechanics, 3. Life Among Stars); Chapter Five: Unidentified Flying Guides (1. UFOs, 2. Meeting David Wilcock at Noniland, 3. Psychoids); Chapter Six: Incarnations (1. Afterlives, 2. Ghosts, 3. The Scam of the Being of Light, 4. Reincarnations, 5. Time); Chapter Seven: Practices (1. Phenomena and Phenomenology, 2. Buddhism, 3. Exercises, 4. Initiations); Epilogue: Camouflage Cosmoses, Callings, and Codes (1. Technocracy, 2. The God Code, 3. Bandwidths).
Endnotes
1. Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” in Dover Beach and Other Poems, p. 87.
2. Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower,” Columbia Records, 1967.
3. Baseball material adapted from Out of Babylon, Book Four: Universal Forces of Light, unpublished.
4. John Friedlander, Recentering Seth.
5. Eric Levai, “QAnon, the ‘People’s Convoy,’ and Neo-Nazis Mingle at L.A. Anti-Vaxx Rally,” Rolling Stone online, April 16, 2022.
6. Seyward Darby, “The Dangers of QAnon,” The New York Times, Book Review, August 15, 2021, p.21.
*Readers may not know that Couliano was murdered in 1991, presumably by his homeland Secret Police, in a bathroom stall at the University of Chicago (where he taught)—still a Chicago PD cold case.
Enticing!
Fascinating; I know you sent this earlier but I just got a chance to look at it more closely. A few overlaps with stuff I'm thinking about & writing about... You mention the "alphabetic origins of the letter Q." After I posted my piece on sentient oil, someone on twitter wrote to me enthusiastically about James Lovelock -- I noticed the word Gaia made its appearance here, but not uncritically "garbled choruses of Gaia" sounds about right to me. I hadn't before come across the claim that Lovelock was the basis for the Q character in the James Bond movies, the member of MI6 who does gadgets and inventions. There's that letter again, and in an appropriately paranoiac context: I hadn't really researched Lovelock, and the news that he was both corporate and implicated in the worst of the Cold War was surprising, since I had thought of gaia as a vaguely eco spiritual concept.My impressions on the matter had been bought by a well-funded marketing campaign behind Lovelock led by Shell Oil and the "Intelligence Community." I'm just curious if you have any reflections on any of this, having lived through the evolution of "environmentalism" or ecological consciousness from Silent Spring to Limits to Growth to Lovelock to Climate Change.