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“Even though we think that occultism and esotericism is old it’s actually new because it reveals to us new vistas of our own being and consciousness that we can bring into the public (cultural) and political and economic field.”
– from my conversation on the Hermitix podcast

Friends,
Can you feel a new coalition, a new view, a new way of being, developing?

Or maybe if I ask a different way, you’ll get to an easier answer:
Can you feel the old coalitions, the old views, the old ways of being falling apart?

A grand new articulation is forming, and while we tend to view it in terms of its destructiveness, I have tried my best to see where the new life and vitality is arising.

An easy reference point is one that can be seen emerging from torment and blood.

In the various queers for Palestine movements, a network has formed between two groups that people and institutions in power have instructed us for years are diametrically opposed, LGBT people and Muslims.

Those of us who have been working for the end of state-funded oppression of Palestinians have known for decades this portrait was false.

So do, of course, the many LGBT Muslims (and non-Muslim Palestinians) who have been generating their own strategies of care, intimacy, and solidarity for years.

Aside from the spurious claim that Muslims are intractably homophobic, there is a deep moral truth bolstering these movements: states should not sponsor ethnic cleansing campaigns against anyone.

In the past (nearly) three years, the connections between LGBT people and Palestinians has developed into deep political affinities that help identify old ossified thinking, loosen up antagonisms, and create cross-perspective & cross-standpoint solidarities.

The withered and particularly cruel claims that “you’d be thrown off a building in Palestine for being gay” have been definitively revealed to have no coherence, and have been made wholly irrelevant.

That’s one new organizational integrity forming. I notice it as a gay man in community and private discussion. It’s an out-picturing of new deepening alliances and connections that arise as the world melts and reforms.

As a podcaster, running Against Everyone with Conner Habib for 8+ years now, I notice it, also, in the realm of ideas that inform creativity, politics, businesses, science, everyday life, philosophy, and more.

I notice it because I’m talking to so many different people in so many different fields, yet see some new connecting edge, some new seeking sensory organ developing.

I talked about all of this at length with another podcaster who sees it, James Ellis, on his show, Hermitix. As James says, there aren’t many podcasts like ours, with the exception of Weird Studies. I would add – though it is more “mainstream” – Team Human to that roster as well).

I’ve listened to Hermitix on and off over the years, impressed by James’s erudition, ability to keep pace with his guests, and set of interests. on my series of episodes.

I identify there something like what I’m talking about: the gathering of a new world view that has yet to develop a membrane around its edges.

I’ve noticed this in my guests in leftist communities where indigenous people are allowed to speak and bring their world views and lifeways with them, changing the ideological landscape.

I’ve noticed in guests from the abolitionist movement, which draws on spiritual inspirations to assist in radical acts of community building, mutual aid, and non-carceral/non-punitive conflict resolution. 

I’ve noticed, even, in scientist guests, who are beginning to see the esoteric and philosophical dimensions of a discipline that was once supposed to be resistant to both.

I’ve noticed it in the proliferation of tarot reading and new thought techniques in punks, anarchists, and artists; paranormal and witchcraft studies in universities; and even a Rudolf Steiner conference at Harvard ahead of the release of a State University of New York Press biography of Steiner by scholars Aaron French and Marxist Henry Holland (AEWCH 311 guests).

But I’ve also noticed the obscuring clouds, the artificial lights that hinder the job we have in spotting, naming, strengthening the light of this constellation.

There are lots of ways to play blame for this, but I’ll stick to spiritual communities here, briefly, since its so easy to locate it elsewhere.

I once joked with my friend the spiritual writer and podcaster Gordon White that he had the same taste in art as a gamer (gamers, don’t come after me, this was a long time ago when Twitch didn’t really exist and all anyone seemed to like was Arrested Development and Lord of the Rings!). He laughed and agreed, but also saw the problem.

Occultists, esotericists, anthroposophists, theosophists, magicians, new thought practitioners, and more have done a terrible job integrating great works of philosophy and art (not to mention political theory and activism) into their understanding of the world.

Whereas the 17th Century Jesuit scholar Anthansius Kircher wrote, “The world is bound with secret knots,” the very people who should be tasked with finding those knots, illuminating them, untying them, tying new ones, have been tethered to their own style of thinking.

Largely, they think they’ve been liberated, and that that’s enough.

Neo-pagans liberate themselves from mechanical views of nature, only to materialistically worship it in and of itself, thinking this is a spiritual view.

Anthroposophists generate a lifestyle brand in accordance with spiritual principles, but then linger there, thinking a spirit-infused aesthetic is enough, trapping themselves in a sort of esoteric version of Goop.

Magicians create physical effects by apparently non-physical means and believe they’ve left the realm of materialism behind.

But liberation is not enough. What good is it to pull apart the ties that bind us to old worldviews if we reflexively pull a new one tight?

Out of fear of the wounds of loss, we make a tourniquet that doubles as a garrote.

We need to be open to the new connections forming. As soon as we are, the future determined by tech, by billionaires, by fascists, by wars, by collapse, all cease to be inevitable, because every new constellation offers a new story, a new sky.

May we all, soon enough, live under that newly storied sky.

CH

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