Generation Hex

An Interview with Jason Louv

by Gyrus

Gyrus: What was your awareness as a teenager of youth cultures, their cycles and histories?

Jason: I was extremely self-aware on this topic to the point that my determination to not identify with any social group probably prevented me from truly fitting in with any. I was a goth at the ages of 13-15 like most people who end up in my, er, “line of inquiry,” but at the time I was the only goth in my school and it felt like assembling an arcane tradition out of cast-down fragments from previous generations—Joy Division albums; black trench-coats, hair dye and nail polish; William Burroughs books; the tail end of Mondo 2000; drinking weird green booze in the back of math class—the usual suspects. It was tacky, but a proud and individual kind of tacky, and fully surpassed by the horror of the onslaught of Marilyn Manson, who made goth into a major trend. By 15 I was a bitter old man of the goth world at my school, waving my fist at the new kids popping up everywhere who had (gasp) never heard of Arthur Rimbaud but did really like when Marilyn Manson carved evil Satan stuff in his chest. So of course I had to hide in the anonymity of white t-shirts and jeans rather than be associated with these upstarts who had ruined my fun. Which may have been for the best since it’s really hot in Southern California all the time and the trench-coats were a bit much. By the time I was ready to graduate, Columbine happened and the whole thing was put into a very very unfortunate context. By that point I was all into chaos magic and determined to become completely invisible from the social order while doing my utmost to erase my own tenuously-constructed and barely-born identity. Which didn’t stop me from being frisked by the authorities, but still…

Gyrus: We talked about Columbine a bit when we met last year, specifically in relation to cycles of youth culture. Pete Carroll wrote about sunspot cycles a bit, and I published a piece by Iain Spence in Towards 2012 where he maps 22-year solar cycles onto youth movements. The idea is of an evolution in the Transactional Analysis grid, from friendly weakness (Hippy), to hostile weakness (Punk), to friendly strength (Rave), to a (then, in ‘97) projected hostile strength current (he terms it “Storm”). [Readers might want to check out Iain's site, where he's updated and evolved his theories.] There was no coherent “movement” of this nature, but certainly a lot of aspects in youth culture—albeit scattered and refracted through commercialism and millennial confusion. Columbine certainly expressed it, horrifically. You were the same age as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold—how did the incident affect you at the time, and how did it feed into your cultural and magical awareness at the turn of the millennium?

Jason: I was pretty aware of that hypothesis at the time and was trying to play my life into it. I had it pegged for 1999 which was what Grant Morrison was talking about at the time. Peter Carroll called it for 2001, but I think 1999/2000 was when it seemed to be the most noticeable.

I think almost all that energy got sucked into the Internet because the kids at the time who would have been most affected by it were in many cases working out their identity crises in online forums instead of in a more physical realm, so there was no unified “look” or music or anything like that. I think the anti-WTO movement focusing around the Battle in Seattle was the most visible manifestation though. Columbine happened around the same time and that was another one. Actually, somebody on Barbelith at one point had the theory that the 1999 energy went into radical fundamentalism, which was certainly interesting if maybe disturbingly accurate. I hope that Generation Hex is a document of that “surge” hitting and some of the people who were affected by it, at least in the realm of magick. It took us all a few years to really process it.

Around the time that Columbine occurred it seemed like there was another big school shooting every week in the US. Columbine was just the biggest and most dramatic. I don’t really know where to lay the blame for all that other than to say that in the moment it seemed obvious to me that the whole institution of American public schooling was outdated and pretty good at producing uneducated, sociopathic (sometimes psychopathic) consumers and not much else, and it couldn’t handle a generation of kids raised in an ultramodern media sphere, and that this was the result—though I’m not sure if Columbine was representative of much more than a couple of absolute idiots being absolute idiots. It was, however, one (comparatively early) incident in a LONG string of “terror” events that have been used by both ends of the political spectrum to completely lock down the country, so in that it really did represent a swinging point away from the tail-end of Clinton-era optimism and towards Bush’s Death Race 2000. It only took the dot-com crash and the election steal to transition from “friendly strength” to “hostile strength” but I didn’t see that acted out too much in youth culture per se. Maybe we have to entertain the idea that “youth culture” may be an artifact of the late Twentieth Century, an outdated marketing strategy from a less fragmented time.

On a personal level, when Columbine happened I was automatically seen as “the enemy” by my school’s administration because I wore black a lot and was moody. At one point I got dragged into the office and forced to change my clothing because I was wearing a Taxi Driver t-shirt; some of my friends who wore trench-coats every day (peaceful nerd types) got pelted with rocks by other students (in speeding SUVs) on multiple occasions and were all strip-searched by the administration at one point, and were just constantly harassed by students and administration alike. We had one teacher who started wearing a black leather jacket every day out of solidarity which was very nice but in general every sensitive goth type in the school was now expected to kill everybody. The entire thing had the effect of polarizing me completely even from the “rebel” stance of the nonconformist student and leading me to feel truly unwanted and completely disassociated from my life. At this point I was heavily into chaos magic and trying to get an “outside” perspective on everything anyway. It helped fuel that stage of initiatory crisis in a way, through complete disassociation.

Gyrus: Obviously detachment and an “outsider” perspective is an essential part of the initiatory process, but it seems clear that many people in our society have problems with getting attached to this—both because of how unattractive the idea of “rejoining” society currently is, and how rebel stances have been codified and rigidified by consumer culture. But part of contemporary magic that is evident in Generation Hex (and on discussions on Key23.net) is the desire to connect with communities, to earth the abstractions and postures of post-modern occultism back into social awareness and activism. How has that tendency touched you, and what are your observations of it unfolding around you?

Jason: Yes, I think ultimately it’s impossible to be an outsider, and I think there really is a tendency right now to want to reconnect magic with communities, which I think is a manifestation of what Frater Achad first identified as the Aeon of Ma’at in the 1940s.

In the US that’s very prevalent with Burning Man. I’ve never been to Burning Man so I can’t say too much about it, but I’m less interested in a once-a-year dress-up and more interested in actually putting these things to use in the unglamorous daily grind of mundane life, and using them to slowly but surely improve our lives and the lives of the people we’re close to. In New York there’s a lot of that centered around Alex Grey’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, which is great. I think that’s a great model for a community center, and something that all cities would benefit from immensely.

The internet’s also been great for bringing people together but to be honest I’m sick of the internet, and the problem, especially with discussions about magic, is that it can be hard to separate out the people who have actually practiced magic in any kind of deep or meaningful way, and those who just like to talk about ideas. Both are great but for those who are just getting started and are looking for actually useful and meaningful information it can be a real mess. But I suppose that’s how it’s always been with magic, anybody looking to get some proper information has always had to sift through small landfills’ worth of charlatanry. Internet discussion forums and even books like Generation Hex are just puffery really when compared to the experience of sitting down or going out in the world and actually doing magic, so the most I can hope for in the current occult “climate,” even my own little corner of it, is that hopefully people will take away enough of a sense that there are other people out there doing this stuff and that helps it become OK for them to actually take that first step and do some experiments without having to feel like they’re completely alone or crazy.

Gyrus: The standard view of tribal societies sees the shamanic vocation as the province of the very few; yet there are examples, like the San in southern Africa, where practitioners are numerous, up to half the population, and healing ceremonies are highly communal. How do you see modern occultism relating to communities in the near future? And how do you see the role of the contemporary magician in relation to the tribal shaman? Healing in service of the community is perhaps the prime function of the shaman, but both healing and community seem to minor elements in the western occult traditions.

Jason: That’s very interesting about the San, I hadn’t heard that before. Certainly I have huge amounts of fun and have often felt at my most human when doing magic with large groups of people who are all experienced magicians in their own right, so I hope those types of experiences can be more accessible for people. Of course finding out where the party is, or organizing your own, is definitely its own initiation.

As far as the community view, I certainly wanted to prompt that with the book. Healing is something that’s a bit more overlooked though. There can be a lot of emphasis on healing in the occult but it’s often of the practitioner him or herself; i.e. healing the division from spirit or healing the damage one is assumed to have incurred from a “materialist” socialization. On the other hand, once you look beyond the occult ghetto, homeopathic medicine and forms of healing based on magical thinking are now big business in the West, which is another facet of what I was expressing in the introduction to Generation Hex, that magical thinking is now everywhere.

Stephen Grasso is somebody who talks a lot about the role of the magician as being the person in the community who sorts out people’s problems that can’t be sorted in other ways. That’s close to the experience of shamanism I had in Nepal—shamanism is a form of healing that people seek out when they don’t have access to Western medicine. Of course in the West forms of healing based on magical thinking are the ones you go to when Western medicine isn’t enough.

Robert Anton Wilson said that out of any hundred people, one will be the shaman or trickster figure. That’s the widest angle to view the phenomenon from, a lot wider than looking at who’s read the right books or who’s got the right tattoos or whatever, or who calls themselves a magician. In a lot of ways standing up and calling yourself a magician or shaman seems to automatically disqualify you from being such, so I guess I’ve invalidated myself and everybody else in Generation Hex in a way!

Gyrus: What’s the plan with the idea of “Ultraculture” and the associated website?

Jason: Well it was originally going to be a kind of cross between an occult order and a social networking system along the lines of Indymedia or even MySpace, but after weighing it for over a year I think that the potential pitfalls of directly networking people together and taking on that responsibility outweigh the potential benefits.

As I’ve just left Disinformation, I’m going to be putting a lot of time into retooling the Ultraculture site into something useful. At this point I want it to be kind of an open artistic collective which people are welcome to participate in, and I hope to use it as a kind of goad for activating people and prompting further magical renaissance.

There are some Ultraculture-related projects that are going to be upcoming in the next few months which should give people a taste of what’s going to happen.

Gyrus: What other things are you working on, and how are your recent (or not so recent) experiences of magic informing them and the Ultraculture ideas?

Jason: Right now most of my focus is going into Tantra, incorporating what I’m learning there with my previous learning. When I was developing Generation Hex I was fully into Crowley and that kind of mad, racing sense of urgency that goes along with his writing. My focus has been all Western Esoteric Tradition so it’s good to have some change. I tend to kind of hover on the balance of doing lots of ritual magic and just going out and seeing life as a magical process. Right now I’m back in the laboratory refining my ideas and my approach to magic, trying to break up some of my assumptions and get further into the core.

I have had some fairly bizarre experiences in connection with the Ultraculture eidolon, though, which suggest that it’s already operating as a slipstream within the morphogenetic field. I suspect the complete crassness of the idea is a kind of smokescreen for something much more involved and intelligent. Developing rituals to contact it might be of use to anybody with interest in the concept, but I suspect it may be much bigger than I or anybody else previously suspected…