LISTEN HERE VIA SOUNDCLOUD OR ON Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Breaker • Anchor
Against Everyone With Conner Habib is funded exclusively by listeners like you. Do you find value in this show? If so, support the podcast. SUPPORT THIS PODCAST via Patreon
Friends,
Something that we do on this show a lot is express the way the spiritual, economic, and political interpenetrate. Usually when people or podcasters do that, they look at magical and occult parapolitics; and that invariably becomes funneled into messages of conspiracy.
But that rabbit hole is almost always just a variation of materialism because they privilege material conditions, material conspiracies. They focus on the manipulation of the world as it is by political agents instead of reflecting on the spiritual reality.
What if, instead, we moved past a focus on material conspiracies with spiritual dimensions and into the way true artists are working with the constitutive forces of being human, and the artistic presence of nature, and the invisible consciousnesses that sustain everything?
To talk about all of this I invited Marko Pogačnik onto the show*. He’s best known as being appointed as one of the few UNESCO Artists For Peace, and also for founding the OHO art Movement in former Yugoslavia – a group that included such iconic figures as Tomaž Šalamun and Slavoj Žižek.
Marko’s artistic work is a conscious communication with the elemental beings and the places they are intertwined with and co-create. He practices something called lithopuncture, which seeks to calirfy the presence of elemental beings and heal the spiritual being of the earth using cosmograms. He also offers spiritual exercises in the form of Gaia Touch exercises… and if you don’t know what any of that means, we talk about it extensively on the episode,
It’s also all present in his books. The best two to start with are Dancing with the Earth Changes: A Guide Through the Challenges of the Twenty-First Century and Universe of the Human Body: With Gaia Touch Body Exercises
But his publications also include Nature Spirits & Elemental Beings: Working with the Intelligence in Nature and Christ Power and Earth Wisdom: Searching for the Fifth Gospel and many others.
His books are filled with exercises you can, and should, engage with as you read.
Enjoy this wonderfully bizarre and love-filled episode.
(*While I’m taking a little break from the series on Irish magic, since it’s proved even more trickstery than my other series, this still touches on Ireland and fairies. They pop up and express their importance. That series will be ongoing, so expect more to pop up soon.)
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ?
A parallel to Marko’s work can be found in director and comic book writer Alejandro Jodorowsky’s healing work, which I mention on this episode. And the best introduction to that work is his book, Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy. It’s a fantastic, bizarre, and thrilling tour into Jodorowksy’s workings.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
An episode about spiritual art and technology informing each other is AEWCH 113 with sculptor and radionics practitioner, Duncan Laurie (he wrote a great book on the subject or radionics, too!). This recording is from years ago that I turned into an AEWCH ep, and it didn’t get as much attention as it deserved, I don’t think. So it’s a bit of a hidden gem amongst the episodes.
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER?
What would a science that engages with the elemental kingdom look like? Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s method of science is brought forward at The Nature Institute in New York State, and though it often doesn’t recognize, explicitly, the elementals, it definitely goes all the way into spiritual perception. It’s a beautiful and vital initiative.
MORE ON MARKO
The best place to find more on Marko is, of course, his website, which has extensive links to his books, his public events, and his biography. Marko is a founder of the legendary OHO Movement, an art movement which also had Tomaž Šalamun and Slavoj Žižek as members. And here’s an interview with Marko about his work in Art Margins.
Until next time, friends!
CH
Conner Habib 