This vision has always included the push to assert the validity of scientific and medical psychedelic research, and the massive expansion of such research in the past decade or so is something that Breaking Convention can claim to have had a bit of a hand in. But persisting some kind of fidelity to the underground roots of modern psychedelic culture — not to mention foregrounding our debts to indigenous traditions — also figure in this vision. These aspects seem to not only have survived the conference’s expansion, but thrived and complexified, without losing vibrancy.

I missed the first morning, and was disappointed to miss seeing if they did — as they did last time, in 2023, the first year at Exeter — a show of hands to gauge who was there for the first time. I was astonished, back then, to see well over half the hands, maybe two thirds, shoot up. I did catch the closing ceremony this time, though, and thankfully they decided to do this show of hands again. Again, well over half. Maybe there were always more first-timers than I suspected. But it seems likely that the combined factors of relocating outside London, and restarting after the pandemic hiatus, have contributed to this surge in interest. As a Londoner I actually love its new location — it makes it more of an event to travel there. I’ve heard that many non-Londoners appreciate not having to brave the big city and its expenses. And, I suspect lockdowns gave people plenty of anxiety, and plenty of time to read, research and consider things like psychedelics as potential remedies. Just two factors among many, no doubt – the end result of which is a conference brimming with vitality.

Even at conferences I’m not a seasoned veteran of, the highlights are of course usually between the tracks, the random meetings and impassioned conversations that flourish before, after, and around the programmed talks and seminars. At Breaking Convention, for me this is amplified by a feeling that I’m familiar with most of what’s on offer, so these days I’m more inclined than ever to just mosey around and catch up with old and new friends. Still, while my sampling of the programme was scattered, it consistently undermined this jaded sense of over-familiarity with the field.

It’s always a pleasure to catch psychedelic historian Andy Roberts, and his trip through the overlooked world of clandestine British LSD labs in the sixties, with its motley bunch of associated oddballs, was a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining prelude to the launch of a new edition of his Albion Dreaming.

I enjoyed Natasja Pelgrom‘s talk on ‘The Hidden Fallout of Spirit-Led Decisions in Leadership and Life’, a cautionary look at the perilous tendency of psychedelic states to command us to take immediate real-life actions. Natasja infused her scepticism with some bitter wisdom from her own experiences in psychedelic start-ups, where the fusion of business responsibilities and ‘ceremonial guidance’ can — and does — lead to some damaging clashes between higher wisdom and lower realities. I recently had my own brush with this compulsion to act on trip insights — thankfully not linked to major financial operations, and thankfully something I backed away from in any case. But it was a nice affirmation to hear this talk underlining the wisdom of holding back.

I caught most of Ashley Murphy-Beiner‘s talk, which examined case reports of psychedelic-assisted therapy where someone experiences the apparent recollection of previously unconscious memories of child abuse. I didn’t take many photos at the conference, but I had to snap her slide summing up her research. There seemed to be no more succinct expression of the profound tricksiness of psychedelic revelations, made painfully poignant by the context of deep suffering, but still embedded in a wider therapeutic context which knows from experience that navigating these ambivalent waters can lead to profound learning and healing.

I was recently disappointed by the new Errol Morris documentary CHAOS: The Manson Murders — it was interesting, but it seemed as if Morris had a clause in his contract that insisted he forcefully merge his own sensibilities with the sensationalism-tinged, never-too-in-depth Netflix vibe. It was a compensation, of sorts, that Tom O’Neill, author of the book Morris worked from, appeared at Breaking Convention — and turned out to be the opposite of a disappointment. O’Neill’s contention is that Charles Manson was deeply implicated in the tangle of US intelligence experiments with mind control and counter-cultural subversion. Given the recent inane mainstreaming of conspiracy theories, it was refreshing to find O’Neill presenting his speculations with finesse and prudence. Someone asked him if he was paranoid about doing public lecture tours touting such sensitive accusations against the establishment, and he politely chuckled as he explained he was forced to answer this question at every Q&A, and no, he hadn’t been tailed by cars with tinted windows. This was conspiracy theory served with a refreshing dose of down-to-earth sanity.

Jaded over-familiarity can of course be remedied by intentionally seeking out things that are habitually passed by, so on the Friday afternoon I thought I’d settle in for the ‘Abrahamic Religions and Psychedelics’ track. Michael Fine was up first, presenting his ethnographic research into the unlikely adoption of ayahuasca use by some ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews in Israel. Naturally this is somewhat contraversial in these communities, but those who partake report a deepened appreciation of their religious traditions. Of course the connection between Judaism and ayahuasca owes much to the recently departed Benny Shanon, whose 2002 Antipodes of the Mind was a landmark work in psychedelic phenomenology, and whose speculations on the role of ayahuasca-like concoctions (based on plants native to the Middle East) in early Jewish history, hover suggestively around contemporary Jewish interest in this brew.

Next was Annette Kaye, who was raised conservative Christian, veered away from this background, then returned to Christianity via psychedelic mushroom experiences. She currently leads psychedelic Christian retreats in the Netherlands. As with Shanon’s Judaic ayahuasca theories, speculative works like John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross hovered in the background of Kaye’s talk, but they were gently brushed aside to make room for her own very real experiences and ideas. Largely these centered around a strange sentiment from the work of mystic Meister Eckhart: ‘What does God do all day long? God gives birth. From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth.’ Kaye presented an emphatically feminist conception of Christianity, replete with juicy visions of cosmic vaginas. For myself, given my formative spiritual years as a goddess freak, this was all strangely familiar. I wondered how Christians — most of whom are firmly wedded to the tradition’s emphatically patriarchal central metaphors — might react. I suspect that for some the contradiction of traditional metaphor, together with it being located — in some sense — within the tradition, and together with the ever-more apparent residues of visceral misogyny in our culture, might result in Kaye’s brand of spirituality being subtly more disturbing than the comfortably ‘other’ opposition of atheism or Satanism. I’m not sure those people were at Breaking Convention, though.

Rounding off this curious track was the most potent talk of the entire conference. Iyad El-Baghdadi is a prominent Norwegian-Palestinian intellectual, who was imprisoned in (then exiled from) his home in the UAE for his dissident online journalism during the Arab Spring. In exile it seems he encountered Rick Doblin, whose MAPS organisation has been a major force in the psychedelic renaissance, and underwent MDMA and psilocybin therapy for the PTSD he suffered in the wake of his brutalising imprisonment. Now, during exile Iyad also befriended Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident Saudi journalist who was assassinated by Saudi agents in 2018. Iyad’s first MDMA session occurred around the time of Kashoggi’s death, and was darkly clouded by the event. Then he chose to undergo his first psilocybin session on the second anniversary of Kashoggi’s death. He confessed to the timing of this with the jocular grimness which any seasoned psychedelic person, whose decisions seem retrospectively to be both foolish and just right, will be familiar with. Deeply versed in the details of Kashoggi’s death — which included his grisly dismemberment — through his journalistic work on the case, Iyad ended up reliving the entire process in excruciating detail. What shocked him was that he wasn’t at all disturbed by empathy for Kashoggi, but was utterly occupied during the session with pity for his murderers. Contemplating the evil they represented, he wondered if a world without evil could exist. Immediately, he was thrust by visionary machinations into such a world — which he described as ‘worse than hell’. The lack of possibility of evil rendered the entirely ‘good’ universe a crushingly joyless block of meaningless activity. Out of this, Iyad’s Islamic faith was renewed with a bizarre gratitude for his terrible experiences, and the meaning his life has gained through being able to work for peace. Mentioning the situation in Gaza, he emphasised that he retained plenty of anger, but had discovered an ability to separate it from real hate. Given the rise of all manner of religious traditionalism and fundamentalism in the world, and the ambivalent potentials of psychedelics, the crossover between these phenomena frankly scares me. This track of talks — moving from interesting, to engagingly contrarian, to Iyad’s heartfelt and deeply moving testimony — allowed me to see a chink of light, the potential for cautious hope amid the righteous hatred. Discussing Iyad’s redemptive vision of evil, an audience member quoted errant Jew Leonard Cohen’s line ‘There is a crack in everything / That is how the light gets in’. Iyad politely pointed out that the line is probably rooted in Rumi’s ‘The wound is the place where the Light enters you.’ I’m sceptical that this suggests anything more than a peripheral point of conciliation between these religions — a point which relies, in the end, on the interdependence of good and evil — but I left this track glad that even this place exists.

On Saturday morning I thought I should catch at least some of the ‘Rave & Revolution’ track. The name of the first speaker, Erica Lagalisse, seemed familiar for some reason. It took me until just before she came on stage to remember that she wrote the fascinating 2019 book, Occult Features of Anarchism. This complex and sensitive examination of conspiracy theories and modernity seems pretty well timed, in retrospect, and since the pandemic Erica has been promoting the book at festivals and raves, and wrangling with the explosion of toxic conspiracism in the overlaps between New Age culture and fringe politics. She spoke here on her long-term project of analysing the role of play and the carnivalesque. Her bibliography slide cited a piece she collaborated on with the late David Graeber, which will hopefully see the light of day soon. Graeber’s work on this topic, especially his piece for The Baffler, always struck me as deeply important, and it’s an exciting prospect to discover Erica’s own important engagement with this theme.

Next, over in the main hall was the ever-wonderful John Constable talking about his experiences mixing his ‘DIY shamanism’ with older New World traditions such as the Santo Daime church and the Wixarika peyote lineage. John’s work establishing the Crossbones Graveyard garden of remembrance for outcasts in Southwark, London — which was inspired by a high-dose LSD experience in 1996 — is a resonant testament to the fact that new, Western, urban visionary experiences are perfectly capable of establishing profound ongoing traditions. Great respect for older traditions mingled freely with inspiration from singularly modern psychonauts such as Antonin Artaud, as John channelled Breaking Convention’s ethos with enthused panache.

Another vibrant veteran of the conference, Erik Davis, spoke next, developing his recent work on Blotter, a history of acid blotter art, into a more expansive vision of the McLuhanesque aspect of psychedelics: the active and productive role of the embodied media — from living plants to esoterically decorated sheets of paper and garishly branded vaping contraptions — that conduct these strange psychedelic messages into our neural systems.

The one smaller-scale seminar I caught found Anna Ross, John Anderson and Karen Llewelyn of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group sharing their experiences of psychedelic advocacy in Scotland. Discussion ranged from efforts to get ketamine treatments for alcoholism underway to the speculative druidic lore around the humble Liberty Cap mushroom. As much as the main stage fireworks, this little gathering sparked with an encouraging sense that the contemporary psychedelic resurgence still holds much potential, strengthened through its diverse penetration of all walks of life.

My afternoon finished up in the marvellous off-piste Roborough Studio — where even the toilets were festooned with gorgeous plant life — absorbing a hefty chunk of French filmmaker Vincent Moon‘s revelatory 6-hour ‘live cinema’. The floor of the dark studio space was replete with Persian rugs, cushions, and a few armchairs at the back, surrounding Vincent at his central mixing desk, where he unceasingly mashed together audio and video from his years of nomadic exploration of diverse global musical and spiritual events. Santo Daime ceremonies dissolved into someone playing a piano in the middle of a desert, intimate indigeous healing rites merged with a Russian industrial DJ’s performance, then some acapella singing in some Mexican side street, then a scene of two young near-naked hippies, arms locked together, gracefully rolling around in jungle mud wearing wireless headphones, lost together in some secret shared world. In recent years my exhaustion of conducive films for the late stages of trip experiences, and my frustrated flicking through streaming channels searching for material which found the right balance between absorbing beauty and provocative novelty, has left me with a vague fantasy of something I dubbed ‘ambient cinema’. Within seconds of settling onto a cushion watching Vincent’s inspired improvised creations, I felt I had finally arrived at a concrete instantiation of the object of my yearning. Apparently Vincent’s Petites Planètes project freely shares all of his footage under a Creative Commons license, a fact which leaves my media hunger reeling with possibilities.

The after-party on Saturday night was impossibly effervescent, and I was excited at the prospect of Mixmaster Morris’s set. But I heard rumours that he was ill, and after a few final enthused conversations, the previous two nights of drinking caught up with me, and my waning energies whispered that I risked illness of my own if I persisted. I retired early, beaten, but carrying a glowing ember of encouragement for our deeply precarious future deep down inside.

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Pinned to the bed by mushrooms, the furious drums and guitars of Nirvana’s ‘Territorial Pissings’ streaming past me in the dark, this sentiment appeared to my then-melodramatic sense of neurosis as a deliciously heightened form of paranoia. Even as you gained some measure of self-possession through recognising and gaining distance from your distorted mentality — as you recognised your paranoia — this self-possession was ripped away by a further recognition: of reality’s callous independence, its potential to still actually prey on you even if your fears are rooted in apparent illusion. The potential for illusion and reality to coincide undermines the security of the distinction between them.

The words originate in Joseph Heller’s classic paranoid novel of contradictory traps, Catch-22, which I’d not read and still haven’t. At that age, my literary reference point for my deepening appreciation of suspicion and madness was William S. Burroughs, famed for saying that a paranoid is ‘someone who has some idea as to what is actually going on.’ Burroughs’ take certainly appealed my ongoing intiation out of society, wherein the madness of the individual is reframed through inversion as a sane response to social insanities. But important as this initiation is, its simplicity loses something of Heller’s formulation, of the curious and infuriating hall of mirrors opened up by slippage and coincidence between psyche and reality.

Over the years since then, I’ve come to be fascinated by this formulation, and I’ve casually accumulated associations between it and a number of other apparently similar perspectives. Here I want to think them through a bit, to clarify — even if the only thing clarified is my confusion.

Heller’s formulation can be applied to the random coincidence of paranoia and actual persecution. Of course, for the paranoid, few — if any — coincidences are random. We might say that when ‘true randomness’ is perceived and accepted, it simply becomes a pure, generalised form of paranoia: impossibly, the world is against you, even in its most contingent depths. Again, in this scenario the actual ‘persecution’ might forgo any specific ‘they’ who are after you — and become all the more paranoid. Circumstances conspire, things ‘just go wrong’. There’s a cursed feeling that never objectifies.

For me, one upshot of Heller’s formulation is that my approach to calming myself down in paranoid moments can become more extreme. For instance, I’m not a bad flyer, but when I do get real jitters, some inner turbulence triggered by outer turbulence, reassuring myself with flight safety stats and the knowledge that I sometimes get the jitters often doesn’t cut it. The tiny percentage of flight casualities doesn’t help if you’re in that tiny percentage, and occasionally getting flight fear doesn’t mean you’re not going to crash. So I have to imagine the worst and make my peace with that.

Of course this is ultimately a little trick I play on myself — the imagining needs enough reality to work, but overshooting the mark could be disastrous.

In any case, the way out is through.

If we consider situations where there is a ‘they’ who may or may not be after us, proximity to them can complicate things. What if they know us well enough to know about our propensity for paranoia? What if they exploit this knowledge in attacking us?

I think this brings us into the arena of ‘gaslighting’, where one person tries to manipulate and control another by convincing them they’re losing their mind. In the 1938 play Gas Light, from which the term derives, a husband secretly dims and brightens a gas-powered light while insisting to his wife that she’s imagining these changes. I’ve not seen the play or either of the film adaptations, so can’t comment on the nuances of that situation, but to my mind the most potent form of this involves a victim who is less than mentally stable to begin with. Their fragility is exploited by the manipulator, and they’re perhaps trapped all the more effectively through trying to deny their weakness. ‘I’m not insane, I’m not imagining this,’ is the most obvious form of resistance. But in its simplicity, in its flat contradiction of their pre-existing imbalance, this denial may paradoxically heighten the potency of this imbalance — and feed into the manipulator’s ploy.

More effective, perhaps, is a form of psychic jiu-jitsu which fully acknowledges one’s imbalance while also working to expose the very real attacks. Heller’s formulation, curiously, comes to underpin a form of self-defence against gaslighting: ‘Sure I’m paranoid, but that doesn’t mean you’re not attacking me.’ Of course, nothing is simple here, and to be effective, such forms of defence necessitate an ongoing accumulation of self-awareness and confidence amid fragility: the ability to entertain the independence of psyche and reality even as their coincidence is wielded against you. But in some sense, awareness that we might be paranoid and under attack can function to help us better deal with such attacks. We accommodate the hall of mirrors, making a shifting home in it, rather than trying to run straight outside and ending up bleeding on a floor of broken glass.

There seem to be dynamics resonant with all of this in the phenomenon of projection. The basic situation here is an inability to tolerate a negative internal feeling, which is disavowed by projecting it out, onto an third party. Implicit in this seems to be the ‘innocence’ of the third party — the person doing the projecting is where the negativity is located.

I always thought this seemed too simplistic, and wondered if a distorting factor could be seen in an obvious source for the metaphorical image — the technology of the cinema, which arose precisely around the time that psychoanalysis was theorising the psychological mechanism.

In cinema, images internal to the projector are cast forth onto a blank screen. Did we absorb from this the idea of the other who is projected onto as being ‘innocent’ of the projections? But if disavowal is the core of psychological projection, wouldn’t it work best if the ‘screen’ (the other person) was precisely not blank? If I can’t abide the anger I feel, and project it, if the other person is completely bereft of anger, it would be much harder to disavow it than if they are actually also angry. ‘But they are angry!’ then becomes both true and part of my delusion about myself. A truth makes the delusion all the more potent — a deeply tricksy pincer move.

However bound by the prejudices of his milieu, Freud’s mind was undoubtedly a subtle one, and it was ultimately no surprise to track down his actual words on this subject and find that he saw this exact dynamic at work.

We begin to see that we describe the behaviour of both jealous and persecutory paranoics very inadequately by saying that they project outwards onto others what they do not wish to recognize in themselves. Certainly they do this; but they do not project it into the blue, so to speak, where there is nothing of the sort already. They let themselves be guided by their knowledge of the unconscious, and displace to the unconscious minds of others the attention which they have withdrawn from their own. Our jealous husband perceived his wife’s unfaithfulness instead of his own; by becoming conscious of hers and magnifying it enormously he succeeded in keeping his own unconscious.1

Does the fact that ‘knowledge of the unconscious’ is part of the mental armoury of this pincer move suggest that the advent of psychoanalysis both exposed and empowered it? The hall of mirrors becomes the site of a psychological arms race.

In any case, Freud was certainly not the pioneer here that he appears to be at first glance. Maybe you were quicker than me to recognise in the above example of the jealous husband some of the best-known words of someone from a couple of millennia ago:

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, ‘Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye,’ and behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:3-5)

In Freud, ‘casting out the beam of thine own eye’ becomes ‘withdrawing one’s projections’ — surely a critical part of the training of a therapist, so they might see more clearly when pulling out the motes (or beams) in their patients’ eyes.

Other associations I’ve casually made around Heller’s formulation have proved less fruitful when I got round to following them up.

When I came across this Jacques Lacan quip, I thought it must have something to do with Heller’s words:

A madman isn’t just a beggar who thinks he’s a king — he’s also a king who thinks he’s a king.

The king who thinks he’s a king being ‘mad’ suggested a certain resonance with the convergence of truth and insanity, actual persecution and fantastical paranoia. However, Lacan is speaking of something a little different. The source is his 1946 ‘Presentation on Psychical Causality’. Žižek cites the quip during a discussion of the Marxian theory of commodity fetishism.2 In fact, it arises in response to something Marx himself said: ‘… one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king.’ From this perspective, the Lacanian quip isn’t talking about a coincidence of truth and madness, but about a madness of a more usual sort, a kind of false interpretation of reality, or a slippage between different levels of life. When a king really believes he is a king, he is prey to an insidious over-valuation of social roles, an over-valuation that is a form of blindness. This is a madness that we all slip into habitually, king or not.

Another thread I wanted to discuss, which is very rich but doesn’t add a great deal to the Heller formulation, is the idea of projecting good rather than bad qualities.

Why would someone want to disavow something good they find in them? For Robert Johnson, whose Inner Gold is one of the key books for the lay person on this topic, projecting good is part of maturation. While we’re not yet ready to take full possession of our inner power, we project it onto a teacher or mentor figure. Part of the art of the role of the mentor is to recognise this, and to skilfully enable the withdrawal of projection at the right time — a withdrawal which amounts to the protégé coming into their own power. It reminds me of what Nietzsche wrote in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’ (Schopenhauer being an inspirational figure for the young Nietzsche, from whom he would withdraw his projections soon enough after writing these words):

Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has elevated your soul, what has mastered it and at the same time delighted it? Place these venerated objects before you in a row, and perhaps they will yield for you, through their nature and their sequence, a law, the fundamental law of your true self. Compare these objects, see how one complements, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they form a stepladder upon which you have climbed up to yourself as you are now…

Of course, especially in our chaotic world, maturation is never a linear or simple process, enabling precious freedoms from tradition and befuddling confusions. And the fact that it’s less obvious that we would disavow and project the good in us perhaps sometimes makes this dynamic a slippery one to catch sight of.

As to the Heller aspect, this goes back to the false idea of a blank screen in projection. We will almost always project our good qualities onto someone who indeed possesses those qualities: they will simply have those qualities, in our eyes, inflated into an almost magical aura (think of the worship of pop stars as an extreme example). The Heller aspect is the coincidence of mental distortion and reality: the disavowal of aspects of oneself via a genuine facet of another person.

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I’ve only been to Greece once before, over 20 years ago. It was at the end of a six-week Mediterranean trip, and Greece suffered because I spent much longer than anticipated in Spain and Italy. I explored Athens a bit, of course, and managed to visit a friend who lived on Poros, an island just off the northeast tip of the Peleponnese peninsula. I popped onto the peninsula itself to see the Temple of Asclepius at Epidauros (at the time I was fascinated by dreams, and the healing incubatory rituals of embodied in Asclepian traditions).

Since then it’s fair to say my obsessions have shifted — in ancient Greek terms — to the goat-god Pan, and the trickster Hermes. It took me a while to get round to the idea that their native landscape — Arcadia, landlocked in the centre of the Peleponnese — was somewhere I could go and explore. Of course, from Virgil to Psychic TV, Arcadia has been mythologised as a magical rural idyll, becoming synonymous with a utopia of wilderness and primal freedom. Despite the fact that the region and the myth are dissociated enough to have separate Wikipedia entries, it’s easy to unconsciously go with the etymology of utopia (‘no-place’) and reflexively believe it’s really not a holiday destination — just a myth.

But Arcadia is very much there, and it’s a beautiful land of teeming wonders.

Athens and Marathon

Unless you live in Greece, your visit will begin, like mine, in Athens. It’s worth hanging out here in any case of course, but there are also Pan-related attractions. The worship of Pan was folded into the Athenian world at the birth of the classical period. In fact, legend has it that he was instrumental in giving birth to this period. This flourishing is often ascribed to the sense of self-confidence the Athenians gained after fending off the Persians at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. A runner-messenger, Pheidippides, had been tasked with going to ask the Spartans — based in the south of the Peleponnese — for help, but they were, inconveniently, otherwise engaged with some lunar ceremonial business. On his way back to Athens, Pheidippides crossed a mountain pass in Arcadia, where it’s said that the god Pan revealed himself. Pan asked why the Athenians didn’t honour him, since he’d helped them before and would do so again. It’s not clear what his previous help was, but rumour has it that his promised help happened at Marathon. He caused his trademark panic among the Persian troops, helping the Athenian victory. (Pheidippides, after returning to Athens, had run the 26 or so miles northeast to Marathon, to report back on the battle, commemorated in the famous sporting event.)

So, if you’re obsessed with Pan, a trip to Marathon seems essential. If you’re not feeling very sporty, there are buses from Athens, or a taxi will set you back around 60 Euros. The archeological museum there is worth a visit — good, but small. If you’re in a taxi, probably get them to wait for you. It’s a bit out of the way, inland from the beach (as is the town proper). I wanted to go to the beach for lunch, and when I asked a museum attendant for directions, they baulked a bit at the idea of walking — but it’s really not much of a trek. You’ll go past the Tumulus of the Athenians, memorialising the Athenians who fell in the battle. The beach is nice enough for a bite to eat, but you probably wouldn’t come here if not for the historical interest.

There’s a nice statue, ‘The Spirit of Marathon’, in the tiny square next to the beach, showing some runners and, nestled in the base, a grouchy-looking Pan.

The plaque telling us that the statue was gifted to the town by New Balance punctures the vibe a little with pervasive corporatism, but there’s an interesting story here. Presumably the runner in front of Pan is Pheiddipides, but it seems the winner at the top is famed Greek marathoner Stylianos Kyriakides, who won the 50th Boston Marathon in the United States, just after World War 2. He was deemed unlikely to win due to being so emaciated from life in Greece during Nazi occupation. Apparently there’s a twin of the statue in Boston. They were created late in life by the Romanian sculptor Mico Kaufman, who also survived a harsh experience of the war in a labour camp.

Further up into the hills around Marathon than the museum, above Oinoië, is a Cave of Pan, dedicated to him after the battle. There’s evidence of occupation going back to the Neolithic. The second century geographer Pausanias said some stalagmites there look like goats. I’ll have to visit this another time. Here’s the museum’s wall-sized photo of it.

Back in Athens, around the conspicuous spectacle of the Acropolis, there’s a couple of features dedicated to Pan. Along the pedestrian street to the west is the Sanctuary of Pan, an inaccessible but clearly viewable rugged dip with a door to an underground chamber. Next to the door is a fresco apparently showing Pan, a nymph, and a dog — unfortunately it can’t really be made out from the street.

There’s a natural cave dedicated to Pan — along with others dedicated to other gods — on the north slope of the Acropolis. You certainly need to get into the Acropolis itself to properly see these — from outside the fence they’re obscured by trees. But once inside, I’m not even sure they’re properly accessible.

On the trail of the lonesome Pan

Mount Mainalo, rising nearly 2000 metres in the Menalon highlands bang in the middle of Arcadia, was seen as one of Pan’s primary homes in ancient times. I opted to stay in the small town of Vytina, just to the west of Mainalo, and this proved to be a wonderful base. I can heartily recommend Panorama Vytina as a place to stay, perched up on the west side of town, with superb balcony views of Pan’s mountain.

There’s a road going right across the mountain, past a ski resort. Lots of potholes at times, and plenty of hairpin bends without guardrails, but perfectly drivable, in spring at least. (I was been told that they usually have snow from November til April, but have barely had a few days snow for the past couple of years — so maybe it’s fine in winter too now. Eek.)

I mentioned hiking to my host, who warned me that there’d been a bunch of car break-ins on the mountain recently. It was hard to assess the level of risk — was this really something to worry about, or maybe a case of quiet rural sensibilities being hyper-focused on rare antisocial acts? Either way, I discovered the issue was academic. For sure there’s probably some good hiking right up in the peaks, where I might want to drive some of the way, but it turns out there’s an excellent hiking trail from Vytinas itself. For anything resembling a pilgrimage, I always prefer making the whole trip on foot if possible.

The trail is kind of an offshoot of the famed Menalon Trail, which winds through the lowlands to the west of Mainalo.1 The main trail is marked by little yellow squares with a black mountain squiggle nailed to posts and trees. The route up into the mountains from Vytina is marked by plain yellow squares. Follow the road straight east out of town, turning left around the botanical garden (full of pines and bees, and unaccountably surrounded by barbed wire). Soon you’ll see a yellow square taking you right toward the highlands.

The trail crosses the road a couple of times, and within a hour you’ll have left the meadows behind you and find yourself very much in the thick of it among the firs and pines.

It’s not especially hard, but certainly good boots and basic fitness are necessary. The yellow squares are very clear, presumably as mountain bikers have to clock them in their blur of speed. When anything other than straight ahead is afoot, the squares are cut into crude arrows.

Sciatica means that walking poles are essential for me on such terrain these days. This new-to-me experience carries with it the slightly melancholy sense of leaving my limber youth behind. But I found that what’s lost of goatish spryness is more than made up for by the way poles connect my hands to the ground, which gave my little Pan pilgrimage hike an aptly four-legged vibe.

It’s said that Pan takes a nap at noon, and is angered if disturbed.2 What’s more, he blesses those who join him at this time, so as the sun reached its height I turned off my mobile, and settled down for a peaceful supine drift in the world Agent Cooper describes: ‘The sound wind makes through the pines. The sentience of animals.’ I have to say this is one of my favourite religious observances.

After a while I roused and headed further up to find a rocky crag to leave some offerings for Pan. I took pine honey (which is sold in absurd abundance in all the touristy grocers in town) and cake (a slice from my breakfast that, as it happened, had a chocolate streak running through the middle which, cross-sectioned, resembled a hoof print).

As I made my way, not sure if Pan had finished his nap, I fell into the practice of being as quiet as possible, refraining from stepping on any twigs. This proved to be a marvellous form of meditation, and by the time I was ready to rouse Pan with some post-snooze goodies, I was in a reverential state deeply attuned to the gentle spring day in the forest.

Failing Mount Kyllini

North and a bit east from Mainalo is Mount Kyllini, also known as Ziria. Somewhere in its heights is a cave where it’s said that the trickster Hermes (often said to be the father of Pan) was born to his mother Maia, a mountain nymph.

I read a few reports of it, and while mention was made of the drive up being hair-raising, I’d also read that Mainalo — which I drove up the day before — is the highest peak in Arcadia, so I guessed Kyllini couldn’t be that much worse.

I headed north, through Vlacherna, across a verdant plain.

Then, up into the winding hilly roads again, and eventually to the village of Goura. I’d reckoned that the mountain road going up from there was my best bet for approaching Hermes Cave from the west.

After a few three-point turns in Goura I found the little road. Well, track more than road. It was a bit rocky, but as I made it past the last building, I reassured myself that often in this area, roads actually got worse around settlements, and improved once you were in the open.

On the track up Kyllini however, this was not to be. Things quickly got much worse — very rocky and forbidding. Pretty soon I caved in to my caution and turned back — luckily, not too far past a place where I could actually do a final three-point turn.

A bit dismayed, I decided to make the best of the day, and headed west to Lake Doxa. Enjoying the sun as I picnicked by the water’s edge, I contemplated Mount Kyllini (in the centre distance below), and it quickly dawned on me that there was something completely off in my estimations. Soon enough I discovered that while Mount Mainalo is indeed the highest peak in Arcadia, there seem to be other regions in the Peleponnese! And Mount Kyllini is in Corinthia, and is a good 1000 metres higher than Mainalo. More research (on dangerousroads.org no less) revealed that the track I’d tried to go up in a Peugeot 206 rental was for experienced 4×4 drivers only. Yikes.

Messaging a friend about this little upset, she was searching for info on other routes up to the cave, and found that there’s a Ziria music festival which organises trips to the Cave of Hermes.

Hmm, maybe a better way to do it? I wonder when the festival is? Oh, it’s today! But… in Athens!

Such a cheeky synchronicity found me laughing out loud at this trickster gesture, even or especially in my failure to reach his home.

Perhaps other routes up, from the north, would be more passable without an off-road vehicle, but I doubt it. Anyway, I felt wholly content to leave this coincidence as my Kyllini experience. I tucked into my picnic, listening to the waves of frog calls, and paced carefully around the boggy edges of the lake trying to catch glimpses of the little critters as they leaped and plopped away from my approach.

Driving back to Vytina, I decided to take the route southwest via Ladon springs, where stunning blue water gushes up from a cave that goes down nearly 50 metres. Previously, looking at photos of it online, I was sure heavy filters and saturation were being used to tempt visitors. But no, it’s as radiantly deep turquoise as advertised.

There’s an incongruously industrial little cheese factory by the spring’s picnic benches, and as I sat having a smoke, a herd of the presumed producers roamed through, bells a-ringing, devouring the lush vegetation. My first Arcadian goats.

Mount Parthenion and Pan’s historical debut

While Pheidippides’ legendary run to Marathon to report back on the battle is the one that’s most celebrated, his more impressive run to Sparta and back, to try and get help in the battle, was ultimately of more interest to me. Because this is when, as he passed through the hills above Tegea near Mount Parthenion, it’s said that Pan appeared to him, marking the goat-god’s entrance into history (albeit of the semi-mythical kind).

However, while Marathon is distinct and littered with monuments, the location of Pheidippides’ encounter with Pan is entirely uncertain. I simply set off to sound things out.

As I puttered around the area, I was looking for clues online, and found that there is in fact a commemorative sporting event for this run — the gruelling 250 km Spartathlon, which has been held every September since 1984. But despite the fact that the website’s homepage speaks of the ‘1200 meter ascent and descent of Mount Parthenion in the dead of night’, with reference to Pheidippides’ encounter with Pan, their actual route map seems to take the runners to the west of peaks closer to Tegea and the Tripoli plain.

If you’re really keen you could spend a day hiking around here to soak it all up. But after my pleasant time in the shady forest of Mainalo, I didn’t fancy aimless wandering in the blazing sun here, where there’s little if any tree cover. I was lured by the prospect of a snaky mountain drive to the shores of the Argolic Gulf to the east, and some seafood by the beach. A bit of a dud pilgrimage, then, and for the Pan obssessive only — though I deeply appreciated getting a feel for the landscape, sensing how Pheidippides may have been mindful of the Menalon peaks looming to the west across the plain, perhaps priming him for a run-in with their beastly master.

Ultimately I think the only real pilgrimage here is the Spartathlon itself. In another life, perhaps.

A Pan Cave in Arcadia?

Philippe Borgeaud, whose The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece is indispensable for the goat-god enthusiast, makes much of the fact that while worship of Pan in Athens and surrounding Attica is frequently centred on caves, it never is in his home territory Arcadia. Borgeaud reasons that for people further north, for whom Arcadia was a kind of revered, kind of denigrated backwater of primitivity, the caves in which Pan’s shrines were placed were a microcosmic representation of Arcadia itself. In Arcadia, though, his worship seems to have been an out-in-the-open affair.

So I was surprised when, scrolling across Google Maps the night before I left Vytina, I noticed a placemark for a Cave of Pan. Was this true?

The cave is pretty close to the town of Piana, so I headed there, and parked up in the quiet town square for a fizzy drink before setting off. There’s a big sign from the town square.

As I made my way along the trail, which has some clambers over rocks here and there, but is short and pretty easy, it proved to be very clearly signposted.

When the cave mouth itself looms into view, it’s impressive. I’ve never said ‘oh my god’ with such spontaneous sincerity. Below is a photo facing the other way from the way you approach, showing in the distance the mountain range to the east, near Tripoli, where Pheidippides met Pan.

But the ‘cave’ is more of a large nook with an overhang than a real cave. You’re only going a few metres ‘into’ the rock face as it were. Pan’s business here is less skulking in the depths, and more just sheltering as he watches over the herds from on high.

I’ve failed to find any hard archeological data about this site. Still, reading Borgeaud closer, it seems he doesn’t deny Arcadian Pan caves; his point is subtler.

We are not claiming that the Arcadians never placed Pan in a grotto. Even if they sometimes did so, however, we can be sure that in their eyes this location did not reveal the essential nature of the god. The Pan-grotto connection, to the (very slight) extent it manifests itself in Arcadia, was not basic.3

But I found myself at the Piana cave with the coarse idea that I’d found some exception to Borgeaud’s ‘rule’. I began to wonder if the Pan cave cult in Attica had been re-imported back to Arcadia — maybe relatively recently, as a tourism ploy by canny locals, or in the wake of Attica’s discovery of the cult during the classical period. But as I sat here watching the swifts dive from their nests into the valley, listening to the bees in their nearby nest, and checking out the various lizards scuttling across the rocks, I wasn’t in much mind to be cynical. Pan was always about bringing wealth and abundance for his people, and the economy’s changed a lot. Would he care that much if he brings it in these days with a bit of publicity from his modern fame, on top of looking after the goats and sheep?

Odds are this is a spot whose association with Pan recedes into the opaque depths of oral history, serving as a spot to watch over the herds in the past, and perhaps in the present too, alongside its new role as a tourist attraction. In any case, it’s a must.

Travelling to Stemnitsa

Soon I was relocating from Vytina to the smaller and higher village of Stemnitsa.

By the road on the way I noticed a temple to Poseidon, Pan and Hermes marked on the map, so I stopped there for a break and to leave some offerings.

Taking a right turn off the main road, very quickly, just after a tiny white roadside chapel, there’s a roadsign that marks the spot where you can get to the temple. There’s a big grass verge opposite where you can park.

The remains of the ancient temple are very close to a church, the worn remains of some foundations joined by a few trees which give welcome shade. Nothing remarkable, but a good spot for a quiet pause.

There’s actually a tiny settlement just to the west of here called Pan, but there’s not much to it.

Stemnitsa and Wolf Mountain

A traditional settlement known for its gold and silver smithery, Stemnitsa is nestled in the highlands. You don’t necessarily feel like you’re that high up there. But drive for a few minutes in either direction and quickly you’ll hit bends with precipitous drops. The village itself seems pretty much invisible until you round the corner to it. This sense of being hidden away and inaccessible led to the place being a stronghold during the early 19th century Greek War of Independence.

I was now a bit closer to one of the major sites of Arcadia, Mount Lykaion (‘Wolf Mountain’). This is where Arcadia’s legendary founder-king, Lycaon, killed and cooked his son in a bizarre bid to test Zeus’s omniscience. His test failed, and a disgusted Zeus turned Lycaon into a wolf — deemed one of the earliest examples of lycanthropy. This fact (and maybe the heavy presence of silversmiths?) got me wondering about local spooks and monsters, and I ended up spending my first evening (after checking into the wonderful Tsarbou Guesthouse) dining in Stemnitsa’s lovely square immersed in research on the Greek variant of the vampire, the utterly fascinating vrykolakas. I thought I was on a complete detour from my Pan research until I found that this creature has as much to do with werewolves as with vampires (the word is from Slavs who settled here in the 7th century, and means ‘having the hair of a wolf’), and of course Pan is deeply connected to wolves ‘inversely’ — as a protector of the herds, wolves are one of his chief enemies. But he is also known to turn his herdsmen into wolves when angered — as he did when frustrated in his desire for the nymph Echo.

Suitably primed for my trip to Lykaion, I drove south the next day. Wary after my Kyllini experience, I decided that even though it was less direct for me, approaching Lykaion from the south seemed more suited to my hatchback transport. I turned out to be right — the road up from the south, after getting inexplicably lost in a power station near Megalopolis, is a fine drive. After I finished my visit to the peak, I thought I might try the descent going north, but quickly turned back. It wasn’t as bad as Kyllini, and might have turned out OK. But who knows?

There were hardly any other vehicles on the way up, but I was compelled, on spotting a wild tortoise inching its way across the road, to stop and speed it along to the grass. Besides, this was my first sighting of a wild tortoise!

Near the peak is the only extant hippodrome (arena for horse and chariot racing) from ancient Greece. Which makes for a handy car park. To the south of this are a cluster of ruins — a bathhouse, sleeping quarters, a stoa, and a Sanctuary devoted to Zeus. There’s a Sanctuary of Pan here, too. The sign says it’s yet to be found, but the excavation project website suggests it’s been located. However, it’s described as a ‘circular anomaly’, so it’s probably understandable that, like the earlier excavators without modern surveying equipment, I didn’t find it.

I set off up the ‘trail of Zeus’, not 100% sure of the layout of everything, but aiming to at least get to the famed Altar of Zeus on the peak, where ashes have been dated back to the Neolithic, and where Mycenean remains have been found (apparently this is the only attested mountaintop Mycenean altar, and activity here persisted right through the Mycenean collapse).

It was Thor’s Day, and Zeus’s mountain, so I wondered about the darkening clouds — but the weather generally stayed OK.

Soon, for some reason, I started to doubt the layout of the track. Was this leading me to the peak? Or had I missed a trail turnoff? I certainly seemed to be circling the peak rather than making much progress towards it. I found something that looked like a trail, though it could equally have been a dried-up stream. Fuck it, I thought, and just started marching up the slope.

It was tough work, though my satisfaction at conquering the difficult trail was punctured a little as I crossed the peak to look down the other side, only to see two blokes having just parked up in the area next to the peak, casually stretching and setting up a picnic. Well I wanted to walk the last bit anyway. I dismissed them with wry haughtiness as unserious Mount Lykaion visitors.

The altar on the peak is pretty dishevelled, very much only worth the clamber up for those whose imaginations are fired by mysterious ruins. The base of a fallen pillar suggested a more glorious past.

Above all, literally, was the view from this astonishing summit.

A couple of Attica caves

I’d noticed the Cave of Pan to the west of Athens just before I set off for Arcadia. I decided I wanted to get to the mountains as soon as possible, and didn’t fancy the uncertainties of stopping to explore something on the other side of the highway from the direction I was going. On the way back, it seemed a little easier, so I decided to pop in.

My trip had unintentionally coincided with the late Greek Easter, and driving east into Athens on Good Friday, I felt blessed by the near-clear road on my side, a feeling heightened by seeing those on the other side coming out to visit their families, damned to a snail’s pace.

The nearest place to park was just past the 11th century Byzantine monastery of Daphni. I headed up the hill from there, and had to find a gap in the fence that I guess was the limit of the monastery’s grounds. Approaching the cave from the east, I ended up doing a bit of clambering, only to find that the easier, signposted approach is from the west.

Like the cave near Pania, but on a smaller scale, this is more of a shelter and lookout spot than a real cave.

Definitely a nice spot for a summer evening’s campfire and smoke, and there was plenty of evidence of it being made use of. (Sadly one of the key markers for me, approaching from the wrong direction, was a scattering of empty plastic bottles.) I’m ambivalent about the graffiti — it can be a bit of a stain on non-urban spots, but this is very close to a major city, and it can evoke a valuable time of transition and experimentation. Anyway, I was disappointed that I missed a perfect shot here, as a lizard vanished into this little hole.

As at Pania, I got a sense of Pan’s role as overseer, sheltering and keep an eye on things from on high. But whereas herds of goats and sheep were my first thought there, here, overlooking a valley coming through the Aigaleo hills to Athens, and bearing in mind the significance that Pan had for Athenians in relation to fending off invaders, my mind turned to the idea of defensive military overseeing. There’s a line to be drawn between Pan’s protective role in herding and his odd engagements with Greek military history, and I wondered if that line passes through this cave.

On my final day, as Athens braced itself for the end of the Orthodox fasting and the feasting of Easter Sunday, whole lambs being spit-roasted in the street, I decided to head to the hills again to visit a Pan cave in the range to the east of the city known as Hymettus. The cave, on the southern tip of the range, above the beach town of Voula, is known as Nymfoliptos or Vari Cave. I did my usual half-baked research to leave room for surprises, got the metro to Argyroupoli, the 122 bus to Voula, and headed uphill, among the melancholy signs of Greece’s struggles with wildfires.

I was meeting someone at six that evening, and thought I had plenty of time. But as I made slow progress toward Voula Cemetery — a kind of edge of civilisation before the hills where the cave hides — I realised I’d underestimated things (again). What I took as a trail from the cemetery to the cave was actually a road, though, so I walked at a good pace without worrying about rocks and holes. Even so, at a certain point I genuinely considered giving up — I don’t know why my later meeting was so absurdly fixed in my mind as something I couldn’t break. In any case, at that moment I saw what I thought was the cave across the valley, and set off with renewed determination along the road that I thought would curve back round to it.

About 15 minutes later I realised no, that wasn’t the cave, and shit, at the very point I decided against giving up, I’d set off with renewed determination in he wrong direction. I’d missed a trail branching off the road. Cursing and laughing, I retraced my steps and found the trail. Thinking of my Hermes cave experience, I joked to myself that this is the upside of being on the trail of tricksters: if things go pear-shaped, you almost feel it as a blessing from the god. Win-win.

As the trail rounded a low hill, it became clear that the cave was just off downhill, so I searched for signs of previous passage and eventually found the cave… CLOSED.

I knew the Vari Cave was much more of a cave than the Pan caves I’d been to so far, but I hadn’t even considered the fact that it might be noted and perhaps treacherous enough to be restricted. And maybe Easter accounted for the closure. Pan’s not dead, but Christ certainly curtailed his realm this Easter.

Anyway, my joke to myself about things going pear-shaped on the trail of tricksters had primed me for this, and as soon as I saw the locked gate, I burst into laughter that finally shed all frustration, and opened into empty,  care-free ecstasy.

As I peered into the inaccessible depths, yet again I thought, ‘Another day.’

The post Visiting the land of Pan and Hermes appeared first on Dreamflesh.

I’m getting less and less of my information from social media, and more and more from Substack newsletters — a no doubt widespread symptom of the exodus from the site formerly known as Twitter, and the general rolling disillusionment with such sites. Here’s my Substack picks:

• I’ve only paid attention to Daniel Pinchbeck‘s work in passing for a while, but over the pandemic I grew to rate him as a very valuable voice in the psychedelic / New Age world. He seriously considered the problems with governmental and corporate responses to Covid without losing his mind, which ranks as quite an achievement in that sphere. How he dealt with his #MeToo moment stands in stark contrast to the nosedive of his former ally Russell Brand, and I’ve appreciated the way he’s wrangled with his feelings, his Jewish heritage, and the horrific evidence in the recent Gaza-Israel conflict. I often diverge from his views but feel the subcultures we share are better off for his public thinking.
• Burning Shore brings miscellaneous updates and deeply entertaining missives from weirdo stalwart and essential cultural commentator Erik Davis.
• I found John Ganz’s Twitter account as the Ukraine invasion unfolded, and still regularly read his Unpopular Front newsletter. He occasionally lets online spats embroil him too much, but he’s usually self-consciously witty about it all. Some great material tracking fascism past and present.
• A Traveller in the Evening is William Blake aficionado Andy Wilson’s base for mining Blake and his fellow travellers for insight into the end of the old order and the ecological crisis.

I’ve been reading too many books to go into, but I’ll just give a brief special mention here to Daniel W. Smith’s Essays on Deleuze. I’ve been trying to get my head around Deleuze’s ideas recently, and Smith’s essays felt like a quantum leap in my grasp of them.

Absorbing philosophy has been a major theme of my podcast listening / YouTube viewing of late. Why Theory, Acid Horizon, and the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour are all good in their way. For me each always has a good few missable episodes, but they’re all valuable for finding your way around philosophy and critical theory. Wes Cecil — like good ol’ Rick Roderick — has some very useful general material, and is entertaining. And I recently discovered a YouTube channel which contains an incredibly prolific, highly engaging, and pretty deep and well-rounded Nietzsche podcast — recommended.

Needless to say, ContraPoints is still as brilliant as they are sporadic. I never thought I’d enjoy listening to someone talk about Twilight for three hours. And the Weird Studies guys keep hitting the mark.

When I want something more conversational or playful, I settle down with the wonderful Blindboy or the irrepressible Lydia Lunch. Both kept me company during lockdowns and both are freaky treasures of the podcast world.

Last but not least, I’ve hugely enjoyed Jeremy Gilbert and Tim Lawrence’s extensive trawl through the decades and across the world in search of a spirit they celebrate as being crystallised in David Mancuso’s acid-drenched Loft, in New York in the early ’70s: Love is the Message. A feast of politics, culture and hedonic release.

Well, so much for reading and listening. I should write more… Watch this space.

The post Current reading & listening appeared first on Dreamflesh.

As with many strange beasts, I found it accidentally, rather than hunting for something I knew existed. Foraging the web for interesting material on trickster myths, I stumbled across the first footprint: an interview with Arpad Szakolczai and Bjørn Thomassen, regarding their co-authored book with an unpromising title: From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences (2019). Despite this dry title, the interview hinted at some juicy ideas: a ‘revitalisation’ of thinking about modernity and its self-analysis (sociology) via concepts such as the trickster, liminality, and imitation, through the work of neglected ‘maverick’ anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, René Girard, Paul Radin, and Colin Turnbull.

I got hold of the book, but as I read it, while I was fascinated, I sensed some perspectives that struck me as odd, infused into the inspiring stuff. Shunning the pretty fundamental idea of tricksters being morally ambivalent, they are deemed here to be ‘worse than evil’.1 I began to wonder about the source of the Szakolczai / Thomassen interview: the On Knowing Humanity Journal, which aims to ‘promote the development of a Christian faith-based approach to anthropology.’2 Also, there seemed to be a constant slippage between the idea of ‘the trickster’ as a mythological figure with an imaginal relationship to human life, and descriptions of ‘trickster figures’ as a kind of historical, sociological, or psychological type. Among other potential problems, these two factors — classing tricksters as evil, and identifying them with social groups — together seemed to me to risk feeding currents of demonisation. For sure, the world is presently rife with real-life tricksters, especially in politics. But it’s also rife with the demonisation of facets of society which fall foul of these scholars’ ideological ire. I’m very wary of both. We should be sophisticated in how we relate imaginal figures to literal people, and remain aware of the fact that demonisation is a key tactic of tricksy political leaders.

I decided I had to delve deeper into this aspect of the authors’ thinking, and Szakolczai’s book on ‘tricksterology’ with Agnes Horvath seemed to be my best bet. Szakolczai and Horvath seem to be two of a number of scholars who cluster together under the banner of the International Political Anthropology Journal, and in universities in Hungary, northern Italy, and west Ireland. I was spurred on to investigate this book by the cautiously positive blurb granted to it by archeologist David Wengrow (‘A complex and timely meditation on the nature of evil in human societies, reaching back into the distant past – while not all will agree with its methods or conclusions, this book offers provocative ideas for consideration by anthropologists, philosophers, and culture historians.’).3 What I discovered was… strange. Erudite, paradoxical, dripping with lurid imagery but at times poorly written, at some levels carefully reasoned but at other levels possessed by an unruly, hard-to-fathom animus, it provokes issues too complex to resolve in a review.

The trickster logos

Perhaps the best broad view of this work can be obtained by considering the authors as devout, generally conservative Platonists. They see ‘the good’ as something primary and simple, something corrupted by evil Sophists who encroach from outside the harmonious community.4 There is a deep suspicion here that poetry and art are inauthentic, mimetic parasites on real life, together with a kind of hyper-Heideggerian critique of technology and modernity. Add in some of the aforementioned maverick anthropologists, some anti-ressentiment Nietzsche, snatches of Foucault, and a bunch of other interesting thinkers, some of whom I suspect would baulk at the context their ideas are roped into, and you have a rough outline of this bizarre intellectual brew.

The general thrust is that modernity is best understood as an unfolding of ‘trickster logic’. Horvath and Szakolczai (henceforth H&S) stress that their interest ‘is not in identifying certain persons or occupations as tricksters, rather to identify a certain trickster logic […] at the heart of modernity…’.5 As I mentioned with regard to Szakolczai’s book with Thomassen, though, this statement of intent is constantly at odds with the identification of actual social types as ‘tricksters’, or the targeting of whole movements or schools of thought. Following one of their guiding lights, political philosopher Eric Voegelin,6 the Gnostics are crucial bogeymen here, along with Sophists and alchemists,7 blacksmiths,8 shamans and sorcerers,9 and jesters.10 Between these two books co-authored by Szakolczai, there is a deep resentment of the ‘neo-Kantian’ orthodoxy in modern academia.11 It seems clear that Marxists and neo-Kantians are the primary contemporary groups tarred as manifesting the evil of trickster logic (a tangled mish-mash of double-binds, parasitism, resentment and… doing something in the dank underground with ‘effluences’ — more on that later).

‘Guilty by character’

There’s a kind of sociological trickster origin myth in here, perhaps analogous to Freud’s Primal Horde origin myth for the Oedipus complex, based on the Vedic myth of creation and the figure of Prajapati. They speculate that Prajapati and his lonely, pain-filled acts of creation are echoes of the resentful imaginings of some prehistoric outcast.

The trickster by definition is an outsider and outcast, and if we start with the perspective of a well-functioning community — and we should have this as our starting point, instead of an absurd, Hobbesian, war of all against all; or an even more absurd Girardian starting point of a collapse of order, as in order to collapse, a proper order must first of all exist, then the trickster is a genuine enemy of the people, and is bound to be considered as the first person to be considered as the culprit if something is going wrong, being guilty by character (hubris).12

I’m deeply sympathetic to their objection to Hobbesian myth; but for me, their own is also riddled with problems. In this context we can perhaps summarise Hobbes’ approach to the problem of ‘evil’ as seeing it (in the form of selfish conflict) as primal. H&S counter with the vision of good order as primal. Some wrong-doer is ostracised, and their exclusion, and the subsequent stewing of their resentment, warps their morals even further. They enter a fantasy world and justify themselves through deceptively tarring everyone else as being ‘guilty’, and — somehow, over the years — insinuate themselves back into community, gathering around themselves a priestly ascetic elite, resentful of the world per se, corrupting the formerly healthy community in a spiral of ‘trickster logic’ which culminates in the evil explosion of technology and political machinations that is modernity.

This interpretation of Vedic myth is rooted even further in the past, in the Palaeolithic, via elaborate and free-wheeling interpretations of the rare and strange humanoid figures in cave art, such as the ‘shaft scene’ in Lascaux. These figures are seen as evidence of early intrusions of trickster evil into the healthy primal community. Contrary to the widespread view that tricksters form one of the earliest, deepest and most widespread strata of divinity, and that the early Stone Age was a time of social fluidity and fascinated proximity to nature’s mutability, for H&S ‘the late Palaeolithic was not the age of metamorphosis, rather the — indeed lost — Golden Age; the real age of the trickster only came with the Bronze and especially the Iron Ages — including … the age of modernity.’13

H&S thus appear as ardent traditionalists. The fundamental break in history is the advent of modernity, and the Tradition that it interrupted and corrupted is seen as rooted in the mists of human time. Perhaps their originality, such as it is, is to see the modernist rupture as the culmination of a strange thread of evil running through history and prehistory, to find the seeds of this calamity running darkly alongside and within the development of civilisation. For them the Palaeolithic contains no radical difference from the later instances of social life which have failed to fall to the machinations of trickster outsiders; the early Stone Age is just a deeper, simpler variant on the Platonic image of simple, good community.

There is sporadic lip service to the rejection of binary moralism (‘we cannot start with the simple distinction between good and evil’14 ), but at the heart of this vision of history seems to be a sidelined mystery or paradox. If human community was originally good, where did ‘evil’ come from? The idea of the outcast bringing evil back from the wilderness kind of passes the buck, since of course the genealogy here ultimately comes back to the ‘good’ community itself. At best evil figures as a kind of emergent force. H&S say: ‘a central concern for any community is how to handle tricksters. This has no clear and easy solution, as pushing them outside only renders their eventual return more threatening…’15 — clearly implying that these characters were evil ‘tricksters’ before being expelled. What is perpetuated here as a disavowed mystery is the idea that while evil definitely exists, we must thoroughly deny the uncomfortable possibility that anything ‘evil’ is or can be immanent to the community, or to reality itself. So while H&S occasionally rail against dualisms, and don’t seem to have much to say about Christianity, it’s hard to not sense here some commonality with the aspect of Christianity which posits an omnipotent, benevolent God, yet also has to allow its lore to generate a Devil in order to siphon blame for evil away from the supposedly single God. Of course, the monotheist’s Devil is widely related to the demonisation of pagan trickster figures, ambivalence flattened into pure malevolence in order to prop up a binary logic in which a scapegoated figure of depravity shoulders the blame for the mysterious origins of evil.

‘Like seductive reptiles in human form’

H&S would no doubt distance themselves from this dynamic — clearly a mythical engine for the generation of scapegoating and persecution — by reiterating their insistence that evil shouldn’t be resisted. Although they only mention this twice, one instance is near the beginning,16 and one is literally the punchline of the book’s very end:

The trickster is unreality and absurdity itself, thus producing evil, whenever it is irresponsibly set in motion, whether by yielding to its incommensurable attraction or by resisting it. Instead of doing so, and following Plato, it can indeed become invisible in good thinking, losing its dynamism if it is left alone.

So it should not be disturbed.17

I find this deeply odd, almost a non sequitur, since the dominant tone throughout the book is one of an almost sensationalist demonology, the impact of which very much does not suggest ‘leaving things be’. The erudite references and sophisticated reasoning utterly fail to counter this. I can only quote at length to demonstrate what I mean.

… [t]he form of the good … is the cause of reality: correct, ordered and beautiful. But insensible merging with evil makes a black hole in reality with stamped, masked people, who are bewildered. They are the keepers of a huge monster of sensuals, and they have knowledge of what it desires, how this monster has to be approached and handled by sensuals, strong and mild, fed by souls, which makes it smooth to handle. The troglodytes have spent enough time in the Tartarus to acquire all this knowledge, though erratic, and they started to spread it even in the form of alchemy, which in fact was only a way of excess, resulting in slavery to demons.18

The mention of ‘troglodytes’ here refers to a chapter here on Anatolian artificial cave systems, which are merged with the proto-ethnographic speculation of writers like Hesiod, to form an oddly seamless mixture of scholarship and fantasy, which to me has the atmosphere of the weirder edges of fringe research published in small-press pamphlets. I found such stuff fascinating in the ‘90s, and have always proudly existed myself as a writer and publisher bordering on this kind of fringe. But here in the post-QAnon 21st century, the incongruity of finding such material in something published by Routledge carries, rather than the thrill of outsider scholarship breaking into the academy, a queasy discomfort.

H&S lament modern secularism’s naivety in neglecting ‘the problem of evil’, and certainly this is worth examining. The sidelining of this mode of thought and rhetoric has abandoned it to realms which do little to maintain any kind of nuance or wisdom: the zealous edges of religion, and the sensationalism of tabloid media. However, H&S’s project of bringing evil back to the forefront of discourse unfortunately, bizarrely, seems to perpetuate the religion-tabloid nexus as much as it nurtures learned insight.

Underground spaces are of course prime sites for lurid speculation, especially that tinged with paranoid erotic undertones (one thinks, for example, of Richard Shaver and his ‘Deros’19 ). There’s a fundamental horror of fluidity20 and darkness here, cast as ‘unnatural’ (as if nature is all stable and nicely lit). Again, quoting at length is my only recourse.

But they [the troglodytes] have judged the process in one way or another, working in alienation, inside the dark labyrinth, in the non-society of the underground, aiming to manufacture something, as part of a fearful and risky enterprise. Indeed, the activities literally undertaken there, were beyond human capacities. They were assisted by the powers of Tartarus, or better say, by the interplay of two similar wills that filled the gaps inside the process, two aspects of the same attributes to amend wretchedness. Both the punished Titans and the troglodytes shared the hunger for acquiring the other, the Titans needing the forms of beings, while the operators wanted fluxes from them. The Titans were locked there by Zeus, while troglodytes, like an army of blind and ferocious termites in repressed, intractable human form attacked the earth with mile-long dig-outs to catch something in the damp darkness, unable to escape any more from the bellies of the earth, earning nothing but losing the meaning of their life there, only spreading merciless violence and imposing terror on beings.21

The living dead live in dissipation, lacking any restraint, engaged in self-indulgence, give themselves up to debauchery. Once their minds and good feelings became sickened and grown strange, they could only be soothed by the excitement of the awful and the exhilarating, as if sucking sensuals from the living.22

The outcome is the living dead state, archetype of the trickster. Their coarse features, unpleasant and cold appearances frightened the people around them. They looked like seductive reptiles in human form — rife with magic in their dopamine frazzled zombie appearance. They were stained and emptied, vacuous: men of many demons, operators of dark forces deviated from nature in the underground.23

Besides the demonological feverishness, in these passages — which are far from exceptional — you’ll notice some peculiar, arguably plain bad writing. It’s interesting to note how a flavour of someone writing outside their first language comes through — perhaps generating, for myself as an English speaker, that kind of subliminal sense of otherness which can easily tinge the atmosphere with xenophobia. Am I othering these others for their own apparent othering of outsiders? If nothing else, this is some kind of confirmation of a contagious insidiousness to the ideas under discussion. In any case, since Szakolczai’s book with Thomassen bears little if any of this style, and Horvath’s solo work (e.g. Modernism and Charisma (2013)) bears some of it, this aspect seems to be Horvath’s idiosyncratic voice, combined with dereliction of duty on the part of the editor.

‘Their eyes upon young and gentle souls’

I mentioned QAnon earlier, and perhaps primed by this virulent wave of conspiracy theories, and the resurgence of ‘Satanic Panics’ in recent years, I found it hard not to cast a slight sideways glance at occasional tabloid-flavoured expressions of concern for the children.

The trickster heavily invests in recruiting, for a flow of new souls is constantly needed to pay off effluences of sensuals. Tricksters have their eyes close upon others, especially upon young and gentle souls, slowly but irresistibly instilling into them the poison of impropriety and limitlessness, blackening their intentions…24

Earlier, discussing Evans-Pritchard’s classic early 20th century study of witchcraft among the Azande in Africa, H&S suggest that due to the hardships of initiation, and the sorcerer’s status as an outcast (‘reconfirming that sorcerers are tricksters of a kind’), the perpetuation of this tradition requires ‘the trick of enchanting, even seducing young children’.25 Since H&S are such fans of ‘normal, healthy’ community, reproduction in the context of a normal, healthy family carries an aura of quiet sacredness for them. And ‘tricksters’, as the errant source of evil, are placed firmly outside these bounds. ‘The existence of tricksters is not the result of filiation [a fancy sociology word for being the child of parents], or formed by bringing together equal partners, but only of imitation … Filiation catches the absorbing, digesting substance by transmitting graceful characters, fine and stately appearances, while substitution by imitation results in an all-become-one monstrous disgrace of ugliness.’26

Now, while I’m not that familiar with the work of Evans-Pritchard, consulting his book Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande (1937) reveals some odd — and presumably wilful — shortsightedness in H&S’s appropriation of this material. I mean, Evans-Pritchard’s very first chapter is titled ‘Witchcraft is an Organic and Hereditary Phenomenon’! He clearly states: ‘Witchcraft [according to the Azande] is not only a physical trait but is also inherited. It is transmitted by unilinear descent from parent to child.’27 In fact, Evans-Pritchard emphasises that the Azande distinguish between witches (who act ‘without rites and spells’ and use ‘hereditary psycho-physical powers’ to attain their ends) and sorcerers (who fit H&S’s image better, using ‘the technique of magic’ and deriving their power ‘from medicines’28 ). H&S, on the other hand, blur this distinction, saying that becoming ‘a witch doctor, magician or sorcerer was not an easy process’.29 In a footnote they add: ‘Evans-Pritchard makes a distinction between witch doctors and sorcerers, but this is not relevant from our perspective,’ — adding, vaguely and unconvincingly, that this distinction ‘could be misleading, as the term “sorcerer” is widely used in a general sense for prehistory.’30 The fact remains that H&S have studiously omitted a major aspect of the material they’re drawing on which contradicts the image they’re constructing to represent the core of their argument. Evans-Pritchard does stress that for the Azande, both witches and sorcerers alike ‘are enemies of men’,31 but the connection between witchcraft and ‘filiation’ is conspicuous by its absence in H&S’s theoretical paean to domesticity.

The Azande only tell stories of the spider trickster Ture at night, and clearly H&S are right to label this as a ‘liminal’ time appropriate to this mythical character. But they can’t simply note an atmosphere of ambivalent weirdness; they cannot resist pushing further, tarring this practice with one-dimensionally sinister, bizarrely-phrased insinuations.

… [Zande] children are often told such [spider trickster] stories while going to bed, thus on the one hand exciting their eagerness, on the other assuring that whatever they heard would stay with them during their sleep, in their dreams. The similarities, but also the differences, between such trickster stories and standard European folktales are evident. The heroes of European folktales are rarely tricksters; and when they are, they do not perform the kind of exploits characteristic of Ture. However, parallels are tight with the impact of watching television, both set on inserting the void into the body since early childhood so that it would stay with them forever, blackening the soul through the impossible idea that you could be anything, thus forming a tight web of perfect entrapment into eternal dissatisfaction.32

H&S’s combination of sensationalist rhetoric — which traffics heavily in common tropes of demonisation — and misrepresentation of prominent sources, leaves a particularly bad taste. (I’ll discuss other problems with the (mis)use of sources in a bit.)

‘A kind of duplicity’

In their first chapter, H&S assert their intent to avoid distorting through projection:

… the trickster belongs to a single tradition, that can be traced to the Palaeolithic, using archaeological facts, and should be approached genealogically, starting from the most remote past, and not projecting backwards our own worldview…33

Even within this single sentence we can note a probable distortion. While 20th century anthropology was in some senses justified in suggesting this single label ‘trickster’ for mythical figures across a wide variety of diverse indigenous and historical cultures, it remains a modern imposition. These traditions are also diverse. I’m a staunch advocate of the value of cross-cultural comparison; but there are limits. H&S seem to be overly keen to nail down this ‘single tradition’, in order to propagate their monomaniacal vision. Their universalisation of their vision of tricksters is perhaps ironic, given their intense professed opposition to neo-Kantian prioritisation of universality over particularity.

What’s more, their section on the Azande contains a curious comment:

… Evans-Pritchard remarks about the general predisposition of the Zande that they are ‘cheerful people who are always laughing and joking’ … , not being afraid of witchcraft because of the power of the witch doctors. However, laughter can mean many things, and while the general, benevolent and cheerful disposition of no people can be doubted, living together with the ideas about the ever-presence of witchcraft certainly must colour such predisposition, creating a kind of duplicity, doubleness or even bipolarity which Evans-Pritchard perhaps was not able to catch.34

I’m not going to contest the fact that witchcraft, historically speaking, often signalled, or helped create, a certain paranoia and touchiness in social reality. But while this speculation about ‘duplicity’ among the Azande — which H&S deem themselves capable of perceiving even though a noted anthropologist who actually lived with the people in question didn’t — might contain truth, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that this might be as much a case of a stopped clock telling the right time as anything. Such is their eagerness to project their own story, sometimes evidence seems subservient — even as they decry projection with deceptive firmness.

‘Moving towards evil’?

Given their staunch valorisation of ancient Greece, it’s no surprise that H&S dedicate a chapter to Hermes. However, their reading of his nature and role seems heavily skewed. They seem to play fast and loose with evidence even when drawing on their own ‘tradition’. Earlier they state:

A further, crucial feature of the trickster, if we combine the various traditions, is that while it is a kind of divinity, it is in permanent conflict with the gods, especially the main, creator deity… 35

Clearly there’s an element of truth to this in many traditions. Tricksters are usually rebels, ruptures in order. But if this is a core feature of their image of the trickster, and they’re so interested in ancient Greece, why wouldn’t they note the fact that in this tradition, far from being in permanent conflict with Zeus, his son Hermes is his valued herald and messenger?

In 2018, two years before H&S’s book was published, classics scholar Arlene Allan’s book Hermes appeared, the first academic study devoted to the god since Norman O. Brown’s Hermes the Thief (1947). This apparently authoritative work speaks of ‘Hermes’ innate concern for proper order and apportionment’.36 Contra H&S’s characterisation of all tricksters as fundamentally asocial outcasts, Allan cites someone speaking of Hermes as ‘the social god’.37 For Greeks he was the ‘friendliest of gods to mortals’. Within the Olympic pantheon, Hermes and Hestia — the hearth goddess of home, domesticity and the state — ‘were believed to work especially well together in the effective running of the household’.38 For H&S, Hermes, like all tricksters, ‘is only interested in his own benefits’.39 Allan, on the other hand, reports that, taking all of Hermes’ stories into account, ‘there are very few instances in which the god acts from his own motives and with his own agenda … Hermes wants his father to uphold the order he has already put in place.’40 There follow fourteen pages detailing how Hermes acts to facilitate his father’s orderly cosmos. (Without wanting to generalise across trickster traditions, but merely to illustrate the weakness of H&S’s generalisation of tricksters as simply selfish disrupters, we can also note Robert D. Pelton’s comments on the West African trickster Eshu: ‘As a two-sided figure, Eshu simultaneously dissolves and reshapes the world, but always with the goal of reestablishing the cosmic order intended by Olodumare.’41 )

A key part of H&S’s mythology is the primitive ‘gift economy’ famously theorised by Marcel Mauss. Obviously this forms part of their image of Palaeolithic life as primally beneficent domesticity, to be gradually infested by devious tricksters. Despite broad evidence of the significant role that tricksters play in hunter-gatherer mythologies, they see Hermes’ association with exchange as having little to do with this archaic order of generosity; to them his domain is purely one of devious, selfish commerce and theft.42 Allan, however, emphasises that Hermes was associated with all forms of exchange, beneficent or corrupt. One of his epithets was Dôtôr Eaôn (‘Giver of Good’); Allan speaks of ‘his concern with and oversight of what we would call complimentary exchanges, particularly those associated with convivial and satisfying interactions.’43

H&S subtitle their chapter on Hermes ‘Moving Towards Evil’, and characterise the Greek apprehension of him as ‘extremely negative’,44 even ‘an unmitigated disaster’.45 (Compare with Norman O. Brown, writing in 1947 on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes: ‘Nowhere is moral disapproval expressed.’46 ) H&S say that in Hermes, Greece somehow managed to ‘pacify’ and ‘domesticate’ the trickster. But this view is starkly at odds with their other comments, and in any case is framed as a ‘delicate balance’ that is ‘always threatening to collapse.’47

It strikes me that if anything, Allan’s work suggests that ‘Moving Towards Good’ would be a better title for a chapter on Hermes. Moral ambivalence is still prominent in this Greek trickster, but his ‘domestication’ seems far more robust than H&S’s biases suggest — and far more robust than I would have guessed from my baseline of seeing tricksters as ambivalent. Still, in the end I wouldn’t want to counter their ‘evil’ by imputing ‘good’ to Allan’s reading. Ambivalence has to be the bottom line when it comes to tricksters.

Manhandled sources

H&S draw on many thinkers who I find compelling, but my impression — deepened by the above distorted representation of Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Azande — is that they sometimes rally their sources inappropriately. Of course sometimes it’s the case that they draw on one aspect of a thinker’s work, while diverging from other aspects. This is obviously legitimate, since it’s unusual for any scholar to fully agree with another. But occasionally there seems to be something else afoot here.

Gregory Bateson’s concept of the ‘double-bind’ is scattered throughout this book, as well as Horvath’s solo work and Szakolczai’s book with Thomassen. As a dilemma created by contradiction in communication, it can clearly be located in the realm of the trickster, and H&S understandably figure it as an aspect of ‘trickster logic’. However, it’s notable that while their entire vision relies on tricksters being devious outsiders, Bateson and his colleagues formulated their theory of the double-bind in the 1950s while studying the genesis of schizophrenia within families. The destructive engine of the double-bind is fuelled precisely by the fact that the person expressing it is a trusted figure of intimate authority (usually a parent). For me this seems to echo H&S’s wilfully blind use of Evans-Pritchard’s Azande fieldwork; the potential immanence of ‘evil’ to the domestic situation is swept under the carpet, and tricksy outsider figures are conjured as scapegoats.

I’m also moved to contrast H&S’s heavily loaded characterisation of trickster outsiders as seducers of children with the now-common knowledge that a minority of acts of child abuse are committed by strangers; family members are the primary culprits. Of course outsiders pose risk. But the ideal mask for truly dangerous forces is something trusted and familiar — just ask Leland Palmer.

Michel Serres’ work seems to stand as one of the deepest engagements with the figure of Hermes in recent thought, so naturally he is a major reference point for H&S. I’ve yet to properly study Serres. However, I recently read Christopher Watkins’ fascinating Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (2018), the first comprehensive English introduction to Serres’ ideas; and this work suggests more slanted appropriation on the part of H&S. Serres’ best-known work is Parasite (1980), and H&S keenly deploy this term to colour their demonisation of trickster figures. But even the brief blurb from Parasite’s publisher suggests significant divergence from the vision of H&S: ‘Among Serres’s arguments is that by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue — creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought.’ Serres’ provocative designation of parasitism as primal to human relations is underlined by an observation that utterly complicates H&S’s precious image of ‘filiation’ — that is, we effectively parasitise our mothers for the first months of our life.48 For Watkins, Serres’ account ‘offers transformative models to the humanities and perhaps in particular to disability studies and gerontology, directly confronting the insidious stigma of “being a burden” by revealing parasitism as the fundamental and universal condition of existence, both human and non-human.’49 H&S speak of the ‘fundamental relationality of evil’;50 for these Platonists, of course relations play a deeply shifty second fiddle to Being. But Serres gives us a sharply opposed vision: ‘Relation precedes being; there you have my philosophy in a word.’51 You wouldn’t be able to gather this apparently basic information on Serres anywhere from H&S.

Of course Serres isn’t naive; his vision of tricksters and parasitism is about danger and risk — and, yes, evil — as well as opportunity and adventure. And H&S don’t have a duty to fully explicate the entire vision of each of their sources. But in many instances, elements of other thinkers’ work are deployed in ways that do more violence to their original context than feels valid.

Thorny resonances

I have to round off my critique with some very touchy comments. How to broach the subject of antisemitism, especially that which comes with hints of fascist rhetoric, in the current climate without triggering those who see mention of such things in contexts other than SS officers goosestepping down the street as being a ‘woke’ witch-hunt? But, given the tone, tropes and perspectives rallied by H&S, how to not mention these elephants in the room, and maintain integrity?

For the avoidance of doubt, here I’m erring on the side of fairness, and not accusing H&S of these toxic ideologies. And generally I try to avoid the tactic which (rightly) deems fascism impossible to reason with, and deserving of extreme prejudice, but which proceeds to extend this level of prejudice an ill-defined distance back up the slippery slope of ideas that may or may not lead there. I see people do this with hazy notions of communism (e.g. ‘regulations about pronouns lead to gulags’), and deem them bonkers. You don’t need to blandly ‘both sides’ the matter to see the problem. Further, the fact that David Wengrow lent blurb to the cover seems – given that he’s presumably more knowledgeable of H&S and their work than me, and that I imagine he would be the last person to tolerate antisemitic sentiments – to put paid to any speculation about a truly sinister agenda here.

At the same time, with the best will in the world, I find myself unable to wrap my head around the idea that anyone wary of these ideologies could write such vividly adjacent prose, in our political present, and comprehensively fail to address the issue head-on. At the very generous end of the spectrum of accusations seems to be the sense that the authors rest naively in innocence and didn’t think to deny or engage with what they never even considered. This would be a back-handed kind of generosity though. Or perhaps it seemed too much of a diversion from their central thesis? Well, this might hold water if they weren’t writing about ‘the political sociology and anthropology of evil’.

In any case, to underline why I feel broaching these issues is necessary, maybe it’s worth itemising some of the key thorny resonances.

• ‘The trickster by definition is an outsider and outcast … the trickster is a genuine enemy of the people …’52 While H&S advocate Plato’s elite rule, they critique authoritarianism, and recent tricksy figures like Trump. So it’s odd to come across this pointed ‘enemy of the people’ phrase. It was coined by Stalin, used by Nazi propagandists to vilify Jews, and became a sly dog-whistle among recent demagogues. Maybe the stress is on ‘genuine’, implying a kind of distance from these famous deployments? This feels like fairness pushed beyond reasonable limits.
• H&S closely associate tricksters with mimicry, with masks used to cover a lack of substance, to deceive and (of necessity) parasitise the otherwise stable community. Compare with Simona Forti’s summary of the Nazi view of Jewish instability: ‘[The Jew] is changeable because he is mimetic, and he is mimetic because he is duplicitous, untrustworthy, a liar, someone who takes advantage of everyone. He assumes the features of others to insinuate himself in the bodies and in the nations to which he does not belong. Here is the stereotype of the parasite as bacteria or as a virus – so as to better undermine Nordic humanity, to erode it from the inside.’53 This doesn’t make H&S Nazis. It does make them suspiciously careless rhetoricians, at best.
• Related to the notion of parasitism is the idea of a kind of vampiric preying on the precious fluids of the people, especially children: ‘Tricksters are soul-devouring provokers of sensuals, duplicitous poisoners who are traversing borders in order to accumulate the sensuals of existing things … The trickster is an evil agency, plotting against the souls which – once liberated, or detached from the body – become discharged into a liquid mass…’54 Echoes of the notorious antisemitic ‘blood libel’, in which Jews were accused of capturing and murdering Christian boys in order to use their blood for ritual purposes, are hard to ignore. This myth has gained new life of late, in various attacks of ‘Satanic Panic’ (without overt antisemitism, though Jews were always cast as agents of Satan by antisemites), and then with more overt antisemitism in the QAnon conspiracy theory which saw ‘globalist’ Democrats sacrificing children for their adrenochrome. The deep suspicion about globalism that runs through both of Szakolczai’s co-authored books I’m looking at here, together with the profound vilification of sacrificial rites, and the elaboration of sacrifice’s association with tricksters (chapter 5), further ramify the resonances with this cluster of ‘blood libel’ motifs.
• Little comment is needed on the tone of the contrast with which H&S choose to frame their exaltation of the Hellenic world: ‘The Greek vision of the world, which is centred, benevolent and keeping one strong, gave them powerful and magnificent features, they became one of the most beautiful people of their time, a small enclave among the mass of stateless, rootless and reasonless, irregular and unpredictable…’55
• Tricksters are of course deeply associated with trade and money. However, the demonological tone of H&S’s rhetoric, together with the multiple other apparent points of contact between their image of the trickster and the antisemite’s image of the Jew, genuinely complicate their critique of capitalism and modern economics.

For myself, even without explicit association of this tangle of imagery and ideas with Jews themselves, it remains worthwhile, even vital, to question what’s going on here. Again, erring on the side of fairness, my main question is: given the contemporary rise of antisemitism (sometimes on the left as well as in right / reactionary circles), if the aim is to critique ‘trickster logic’ and not to scapegoat actual people, notably Jews, why aren’t these issues addressed head-on?

There’s practically no discussion of Judaism in Szakolczai’s book with Horvath. But in his book with Thomassen, the major section related to Judaism only intensifies the question about not even minimally confronting antisemitism. In one of the many instances where actual groups of people are tarred with the now-unambiguously evil name of the trickster, the Sophists of ancient Greece are twinned with the Pharisees of Second Temple Judaism.

The parallels between the Pharisees and the Sophists are quite close, even striking. Just as the Sophists were the main enemies of Socrates, the Pharisees were the main enemies of Jesus. … Although the Pharisees were not foreigner outsiders, like the Sophists, they were external to the main circles of power, being plebeian intellectuals, while their central concern was exactly to get inside, in the sense of gaining power and influence – a central feature of trickster figures in depersonalised urban societies. Gaining power and influence among the masses would be their genuine obsession … The Pharisees aimed to gain power through a shrewd combination of tricks … Even further, and sealing their achievements, they conjured up the trick of identity politics … sparkling [sic] a genuine politics of mutual hatred.56

No mention of the fact that notable recent scholars doubt ‘that there were any substantial differences between Jesus and the Pharisees’, and believe the New Testament accounts of their conflicts ‘have more than a slight air of artificiality.’57 And – given such a dense confluence of antisemitic tropes – it’s odd that there’s simply no mention of the fact that, since Pharisaic Judaism gave rise to mainstream Rabbinic Judaism, ‘anti-Pharisaism has been virtually synonymous with antisemitism and a source of inflamed hatred of Jews.’58

Kōjin Karatani’s work on the history of ancient Greek philosophy has shown me that H&S’s view of the Sophists is a little too beholden to Plato’s distorted image of them.59 Similarly, their view of the Pharisees seems to naively rely on the questionable evidence of the Gospels.60

The impact of the section on the Pharisees is capped off by the section that immediately follows it, which declares:

The argument we are building up … is that the modern world is the outcome of a series of liminal crises leading to schismogenic developments and ending up by placing imitative trickster logic at the very heart of modern life, undermining participatory life and gift relations.61

I concur with the basic idea that the figure of the trickster is crucial for understanding the tumultuous modern world, and on many points concur with their critique of the devastating effects of modernity’s economic and scientific ideologies. However, when this is framed by casting the trickster as evil, and by identifying specific historical groups as ‘tricksters’, who thrive in chaotic liminal situations and thus scheme to create such situations and prey on the vital fluids of ‘the people’, and who have massively succeeded in creating the rootless modern world of capitalist globalisation… even when none of those historical groups you identify as tricksters are Jewish, I’d say be careful with this kind of conspiratorial analysis and rhetoric. When you actually identify as tricksters the historical group who became the mainstream of modern Jewry, and instead of being careful, you litter your prose with luridly fantastical imagery of parasitism, underground machinations, and dark sacrificial rites… you’ve got some serious questions to ask yourself.

I don’t know about you, but for me this ambivalence – between apparently being blandly tolerated by academic colleagues and publishers, at the same time as wielding such clearly problematic rhetoric and analysis – has had me disoriented. I can see how some might resolve tension through taking a firm side for or against H&S. But – while I definitely lean towards ‘against’ – I don’t want to lose sight of this tension, because it’s utterly central to the issue at hand. Finding such slippery ambivalence in interpreting a text… we can only be in trickster territory.

The trickster’s party

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake famously wrote of John Milton’s Paradise Lost:

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.

This was of course a compliment from Blake, who valorised the vital liberatory rebellion of Satan against the dismal, oppressive ‘Nobodaddy’ worshipped by orthodox Christianity.

I don’t mean it as a compliment, but a paraphrase of this comment of Blake’s constantly returned to me while reading this book: perhaps H&S are of the trickster’s party without knowing it.

It’s interesting that H&S’s main man himself, Plato, is classed by avid Plato scholar Earl Fontainelle (creator of the monumental Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast) as ‘the ultimate literary trickster … Plato was first and foremost a trickster, a fact which cannot be overemphasised.’62 Despite his voluminous literary output, he never appears as a first person, and appears as a third person just a few times. Almost all of ‘his’ ideas are placed in the mouths of literary masks: characters based on real-life people like Socrates, who in some ways echo their real-life counterparts, but clearly deviate from them into realms created by Plato, but with a complex, creative, aporetic63 relationship to whoever Plato ‘really’ was. Often, the substance of Plato’s philosophy is not only placed ambiguously in the mouths of others, but is nested many levels deep in reports of reports of reports. There may well be a debate about whether the famed Platonic ‘noble lie’ is ‘noble’, or a ‘lie’,64 but his dazzling literary achievement is certainly steeped in slyness.

However, whereas Plato’s tricksiness is knowing and skillfully crafted, the tricksy aspects to H&S’s book seem unconscious. Or are they? It’s hard to know in trickster territory. How could someone declare on their first page that evil means ‘going beyond limits’, then spout such excessive rhetoric – and remain unreflective about this fact?

Implicit in their enthusiastic subscription to Plato’s low opinion of the Sophists is a deep suspicion of rhetorical manipulation. And when discussing the rites of the Kabeiroi (a group of fringe ancient Greek gods that they associate with Hermes), H&S deem them ‘highly suspect’, involving ‘sinister speculation that is not based on true understanding but a mixing of the divine and the human, with the possibly quite sinister aim of inciting emotions.’65 Yet I would class much of the prose in this book as darkly emotive in the extreme, even if it wasn’t ‘academic’.

I always wanted academia to inject more passion into its writing; as they say, be careful what you wish for.

Tricksy all the way down

This book’s rhetoric of trickster-loathing, its demonological tone, and occasional antisemitic resonances, appear to my historical imagination as eruptions on the surface of a particular way of envisioning our species’ deep past and historical arc. My differences with H&S can be grounded in differing visions of how humanity grew out of nature, and how we processed this emergence throughout our history.

For H&S, to repeat, ‘the late Palaeolithic was not the age of metamorphosis, rather the — indeed lost — Golden Age; the real age of the trickster only came with the Bronze and especially the Iron Ages — including … the age of modernity.’66 The ‘late’ Palaeolithic is specified, presumably, because this is the period in question in their discussion of cave art (between about 50,000 and 12,000 BCE). Presumably they would extend this ‘Golden Age’ into earlier times. If so, in this vision, the Fall from Eden happens slowly. Various factors lead to a gradual influx of trickster evil (the factors discussed by H&S include guilt over the invention of long-range hunting weapons, and kickback from social ostracism). Trickster logic is set in motion, and much of the ‘progress’ of civilisation – especially the flourishing of modernity – is seen as the result of this demonic incursion. Instead of the Biblical Fall – singular, early and calamitous, with a long, tragic backwash – we have a slow build to the multi-faceted, late and calamitous Fall of modernity.

Crucial to this vision is the metaphysical sense that a primal order of harmonious Being is, over time, corroded, fractured, disintegrated. There are two major responses to this narrative arc of decline. One is the liberal progressive narrative of ascent, à la Thomas Hobbes and Steven Pinker, which sees no Eden, painting early human life as a conflicted, brutish mire from which rationality inexorably lifts us. Another response is to claim that ‘it was ever thus’; or at least, all this guff about narrative arcs is just fantasy projected onto aimless wandering through time.

I have more time for the ‘aimless wandering’ idea than the progressive and regressive ideas. But I believe fantasy, in the form of narrative arcs and motifs, is deeply important for our reality, for how we construct our lives in relation to our history. And I’ve found that Timothy Morton’s recent work contains one of the most interesting and considered fantasies about our deep past, which usefully undercuts the ideology underpinning H&S’s work. Morton speaks of ‘the Severing’, a playfully mythic take on the rupture caused by the Agricultural Revolution. But the Severing has a twisted relationship to the typical notion of the Fall. In one sense, it’s ‘regressive’, rating Palaeolithic life kind of positively, in comparison to agricultural civilisation and modernity. But the standard regressive narrative is warped by seeing in the Severing, rather than a fall away from wholeness, a retreat into fantasies of wholeness.67 We retreated from the ragged, uncertain realm of ecological relations, which Morton terms the symbiotic real: ambivalent, multiplicitous, vital, spectral. Settled agricultural life, in beginning to create greater distances from wider ecologies, set in motion a withdrawal from intimacy with this strange realm, into a compensatory dream of harmonious purity. In Humankind (2019) Morton writes:

The violence of post-Mesopotamian civilization is precisely not a deracination from Nature. The violence is the establishment of a human ‘world,’ cosy, seemingly self-contained […], walled off from the disturbing / wonderful paranoid play of the symbiotic real. A world bounded by wild Nature on its physical outside, and by Eden on its historical outside. Humankind is not a fragmented being trying to stitch itself back together again into Adam Kadmon or Hobbes’ Leviathan. The Severing consists precisely in the stitching together itself, one of whose logical conclusions is fascism; a schizophrenic defense against the symbiotic real.68

This cosy human ‘world’ seems to be a fair approximation of that which H&S ascribe to their normal, healthy Platonic community, which they project into the deep past. And the ‘disturbing / wonderful paranoid play of the symbiotic real’ is of course the trickster character of the Palaeolithic, and ecological relations, which H&S deny.

This isn’t the place to fully argue this point. And of course it must be stressed that the terrain of the debate – the earliest millennia of human existence, and our evolution from apes – is shrouded by temporal distance, and subject to great uncertainty. It’s also a vast span of time, surely involving a great deal of variety.69 My main reason for rallying Morton’s Severing here, is to suggest a plausible alternative to H&S’s view of the deep past as a Golden Age of stable, consistent harmony. For my money, this latter view is largely a civilised projection, intensified by modernity: a nostalgically skewed grasp of the past which is constructed in reaction to – and is thus deceptively entangled with – the particular upheavals of civilisation and modernity.

My sense is that wherever the debate about the role of antisemitism in this work ends up, the study of antisemitism has relevance to H&S’s trickster-loathing because there’s a profound structural analogy between the two. As Slavoj Žižek writes, ‘the anti-Semitic idea of the Jew has nothing to do with Jews; the ideological figure of the Jew is a way to stitch up the inconsistency’ of the ideological system of the antisemite.70 Like H&S’s trickster, the antisemite’s Jew is ‘an external element, a foreign body introducing corruption into the sound social fabric.’71 ‘In Nazi ideology, all human races form a hierarchical, harmonious Whole […] — all races except the Jews: they have no proper place, their identity is a “fake”, it consists in trespassing the frontiers, in introducing unrest, antagonism, in destabilizing the social fabric.’72 The structural resemblance with H&S’s image of the trickster is almost total. Again, combined with the identification of Pharisees as tricksters in Szakolczai & Thomassen’s book, the absence of any attempt to extricate this analysis from antisemitism is puzzling at best.

Again, of course this doesn’t mean that real-world tricksters don’t exist, or pose no threat. What’s at stake here is how such figures are related to mythic frames, and how mythic frames function to sustain cosy illusions. Even as they hit upon occasional insights into the trickster, H&S perpetually construct this figure as an essential foil to their simplistic image of primal domesticity, fortifying what Morton would call defence against the symbiotic real: the far weirder togetherness in the shifting roots of our existence.

Squandered potential

There’s an interesting book in here somewhere, smothered beneath the motivated reasoning, slanted scholarship, and emotive rhetoric. Before I got bogged down by the murky demonology, I certainly felt my own fondness for trickster figures being usefully challenged. Unlike H&S’s binary logic which classes them as ‘evil’, I never really classed them as ‘good’. However, in valorising the very ambivalence they represent, perhaps I had fallen for an especially tricksy binary – that between ambivalence and binaries! (My sense from what I’ve read of Michel Serres’ work is that he managed this tightrope act in an interesting way, mindful enough of real life to not slip into an abstract valorisation of ambivalence, or into carelessness about the evil within this ambivalence. I imagine I may return to some of the more interesting ideas in this book — and, most likely, proceed to the thinkers behind them, sidestepping H&S’s demonology.)

Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to modernity surely has some time for biting critique of technology and political deceptions. Especially now, in the brutal 21st century battering of the late 20th century’s last-ditch optimism. But H&S’s critique is too extreme to be useful, and too freighted with lascivious demonisation to be truly insightful. Maybe they feel they’re being necessarily extreme to counter the inertia of modernity’s smug self-regard. For me, this simplistic opposition, and much of the rest of their thinking, demonstrate a lower-dimensional view of modernity, a naivety about their relationship to it, and ultimately an inability to relate to and navigate modernity’s ambivalence, to navigate ambivalence itself – an inability of a piece with their view of the trickster as fundamentally demonic.

The conspiratorial cult of QAnon is a populist bastard cousin of H&S’s more lurid rhetoric, and the fact that its hysteria about child trafficking actually hobbled genuine efforts to tackle this issue reveals in extreme form a danger I think exists in H&S’s work. Their tone and analysis is unhinged enough to muddy the waters of discourse, and reassure those who still cling to a destructively naive faith in progressive modernism that their critics are peculiar eccentrics at best.

H&S do combine their critique of capitalism with attention to its role in our ecological crisis, and this is utterly vital. But the spectre of eco-fascism looms too large to allow H&S’s rosy image of ancient Greeks with magnificent features and crystal-clear mountain streams, alongside antisemitism-flavoured conspiratorial rhetoric, to pass by unchallenged.

Their scepticism about political deceptions is of course welcome. But while its roots in their experience of the tricksiness of communism in their native Hungary has the potential to edify the naive strains of leftism in western Europe, this potential seems to be squandered through traditionalist fervour, and undermined by Platonic elitism. Likewise, their critique of democracy, universalism and the ‘open society’ founders, for me, amid the reactionary resonances surrounding it.

Haunting their entire ‘genealogical’ narrative of tricksters is a curious dissonance. The arc of their narrative has tricksters and their logic increasingly present in history. But even if we set aside their unconvincing assertion that the Palaeolithic was mostly a trickster-free Golden Age, we’re left with the fact that their beloved ancient Greece had a prominent trickster firmly embedded in its pantheon. In contrast, their hated modern era, following millennia of trickster myths being sidelined in favour of Manichean monotheist binaries, did away with respect for mythic ambivalence altogether through rationalist secularism.

H&S have a complex argument that locates rationalism in the trickster lineage, which cannot be dismissed out of hand – as any student of the roots of modern science in Renaissance Hermeticism will testify. But awareness of the presence of out-of-control trickster logic in modernity – ‘Hermes inflation’, as James Hillman has it73 – must surely be paired with awareness of the dearth of mainstream engagement with trickster myths. I’m not saying that if we all had trickster altars behind our front doors, modernity would be a bed of roses. I am saying that tricksters represent something weirdly fundamental to the world, and cultural failure to accept and relate to this leads precisely to this logic running riot. In this very Jungian sense, H&S’s demonisation of the trickster, conflating the figure straightforwardly with complex real-world evils, along with their reactive fantasy of lost wholeness, is part of the problem they diagnose. They occasionally confess that they feel trickster logic is ‘our destiny’,74 but instead of dealing with this reality, they stringently deny its roots in natural ecological complexities, fantasise a lost Eden, and retreat into paranoid, duplicitous demonology.

I’ve failed to find any other review of or response to this book, and the author’s appearances on YouTube don’t seem particularly popular. I’ve repeatedly questioned the time I’ve spent writing this review, wondering if I should follow H&S’s own advice and – to the extent that they may be unconsciously of the trickster’s party without knowing it – leave them alone. Everyone else seems to be doing so.

But for anyone interested in tricksters, the book raises important issues despite itself, and has a certain appeal for people like me who slow way down and rubberneck when passing weird and contentious scholarship. If anyone else tackles this strange beast, hopefully this review suggests some complementary, cautionary, and contrary perspectives.

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We discuss the cosmological dimension to the death of god in Nietzsche; the radical Nonconformist Protestant sects of the Civil War era, with their quasi-animistic take on god’s presence to the lay brethren; the ‘Gnostic’ world-view of the material kosmos as a dark, dead place, and man’s true home located elsewhere viewed cosmologically as one iteration of the polar cosmos; the political entanglements between the polar axis and worldly power in a number of contexts; the modern interiorised ‘individual self’ as a fragment of the fallen world-tree; Norse mythology and Plato’s use of the cranium; the story of triumphant modern explorers seeking the actual, ‘physical’ poles; esoteric fascists and their occultural echoes; the radical democritisation of esoteric materials in contemporary culture, and possible ramifications thereof; conspiracy-theory as ‘incomplete Copernican revolution’; Giordano Bruno’s infinite cosmos and run-ins with established church authority; the Chinese polar cosmos as a test-case for making broad conclusions about what happened in the west in the seventeenth century; and much more.

Check it out.

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Alongside Weird Studies, the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast has become mandatory listening in my world. Host Earl Fontainelle has set himself a monumental task, of surveying the entirety of the Western esoteric tradition, from beginning to end, including all the most recent scholarship — either referring to it, or interviewing the scholars themselves. I think it’s a few years into a projected decade of podcasting…

Recently I travelled to the edge of Dartmoor, visited the charming SHWEP HQ, and recorded a conversation with Earl for the SHWEP’s ‘Oddcast’ — a side-stream of episodes which for various reasons don’t fit in the main chronological flow. It was great chatting to Earl, who has a particular interest in, and deep knowledge of, ‘ascent traditions’ and their historical roots.

Alongside the first part of our chat, do check out the main podcast’s complementary episode on the nitty-gritty of Mithraic ascent, with strong polar elements.

Heck, check out the entire podcast — start at the beginning and strap in, it’s a wild ride.

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Last year, as lockdown and sciatica conspired to keep me inactive, podcasts became a lifeline to the human voice and stimulating ideas, and Weird Studies became a favoured staple. I ploughed through every episode from the beginning and had a great time doing so.

In light of the fact that in recent years my research into Pan — which gave rise to the essay ‘Sketches of the Goat-God in Albion‘ in 2010 — has roused itself and is gradually exploring new territory, and the fact that Pan is a deeply important figure presiding over the Weird, it’s very apt that when we got round to recording an interview for the podcast, it was the goat-god who took centre stage. Please enjoy this lively, capricious even, conversation between me, and the inimitable WS hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel: https://www.weirdstudies.com/102

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You can read my gnomic review of the first edition, and get your hands on a copy via the Three Hands website.

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Phil had moved on from Leeds by then, but becoming aware that a seminal chaos magic scene had unfolded in my new stomping grounds acted both to connect me to magic’s imperative to push boundaries, and to be reminded that for all magic’s outlandish allure, its most important struggles and breakthroughs happen — where else? — in the thick of your everyday life.

‘With Both Hands’, the short story in question, is included here in the Fiction section. Its tongue-in-cheek, down-to-earth, semi-autobiographical depiction of the messily naive side of Phil’s magical path stands the test of time in showing a commitment to the complicated realities of occultism. The combination of a willingness to dive into uncharted waters, with a lack of shame in admitting to being scared shitless — and learn — is a testament to the great value in chaos magic’s contribution to modern esotericism: irreverent boldness combined with a refusal to cloak experience with exoticist obfuscation.

The collection is divided into sections representing Phil’s wide range of interests over four decades: ‘Chaos’, ‘Paganisms’ (his early years involved a lot of Wicca), ‘Practice’, ‘Tantra’ (the path which has come to dominate his practices), ‘Sexualities’ (there’s some wonderfully honest and revealing explorations here), ‘Histories’ (Phil’s been increasingly involved in edifying excavations of occult history), and ‘Fiction’ (a few great little examples of blunt humour undercutting the po-faced side of occultism, mixed with a great sensitivity to the importance of the imaginative engines at the heart of magical practice). Everything is framed by present-day reflections, contextualising each piece with personal and cultural history.

Interviewing Phil in 1997, he told me he saw himself as ‘an anarcho-romantic Chaos Magician, rather than a rational, technocratic one’, but Phil’s willingness to embrace analysis and theory has always been a fruitful counterpoint to his romantic leanings. Drawing on his sociological studies, early fascination with IT geekery, and his experience of group dynamics in occupational therapy and the corporate world, he shows that cynicism about cold, utilitarian approaches to practice needn’t preclude mining aspects of those worlds to sharpen the tools in your kit. He’s keen to delve into continental philosophy for new models of thought and experience without being captured by the glamour of its jargon. And chaos magic’s hands-on results-oriented is complemented by an insistence that theory always informs practice — and as such, should be questioned. His appraisals of magical group dynamics especially demonstrate an awareness which is both sophisticated yet plain-speaking. More than any romantic-rational binary, Phil’s overall approach makes me think of the bog-standard Western magical ideal of balancing the four faculties of intellect (the Sword), emotions (the Cup), embodiment (the Pentacle), and will (the Wand). But there’s no trace of anodyne, abstract harmonisation here; the balance is found in ongoing engagement which never settles into illusions of completion.

Phil’s biggest critical issue with chaos magic is the tendency for its detachment from specific belief systems to unwittingly(?) hook up with the modern West’s tendency to see itself as ‘above and beyond’ other cultures, a kind of superior and neutral vantage point. This manifested in spiritual discourse as ‘perennial philosophy’ — from Renaissance Hermeticism’s Prisca theologia to Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God. Despite good universalist intentions and certain valuable insights, this modern perspective is often freighted with colonialist baggage. And despite its ostensible rupturing of habitual modern thinking, chaos magic too often persisted this insidiously ‘above it all’ aspect of modernity, missing how it ironically represents a manifestation of our own particular historical conditions. Phil juggles this complex conundrum skilfully. For myself, I’m reminded of the emphatic immanence found in the heart of apparently ‘transcendental’ traditions like Zen and tantra. Here, the quest for a remote ‘nirvana’ is both completed and undercut by the nondualist realisation that nirvana is samsara (and samsara is nirvana). From deep dives into historical particularities to immersion in sensual immediacy and the messy tangles of human relationships, Phil’s transcendent drive never loses sight of the illusory nature of separation between transcendence and immanence.

This excellent collection is at once a valuable series of reflections from an experienced magician, and an eclectic guide to the magical path which will both undermine the pretensions of ‘advanced’ practitioners, and warmly encourage the uncertain enthusiasm of the novice.

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