RIP Dr Hyatt

It happened back in February, but I’ve only just heard: Christopher Hyatt, occultist and psychotherapist, author of numerous books on magic and brain/body change, and prolific publisher, has died.

I always found New Falcon’s output a slightly mixed bag, but among its catalogue there were many utterly essential works by Robert Anton Wilson, Phil Hine’s definitive chaos magic manuals, and a long list of other gems from modern Western occultism. Hyatt’s own Undoing Yourself helped give me some of the most revelatory months of my life.

More generally, his great contribution was his energetic appetite for synthesizing the therapeutic work of people like Wilhelm Reich (which he learned from Golden Dawn luminary Israel Regardie) with the full spectrum of psychedelia and sorcery that Western culture generated in the latter part of the 20th century. Without being too arsey about it (he inherited a good line in healthy cynicism from Nietzsche and others), he seemed to me to be re-synthesizing the divergent threads that sprang from the archaic craft of shamanism.

The occult and healing, because of their common ancestry, have always been connected, but modern esotericism often forgot the fact. Things have changed a lot in this regard over the past couple of decades or so; in part, this is thanks to Hyatt’s single-minded will to have more fun and pleasure by any means necessary—and to help others do likewise.