Marginalia and Religious Ethnography Botched: Interview with Keith418 on class, politics, and religion

Keith418 is one of the most controversial figures in modern Thelema.  His interviews on the defunct Thelema: Coast to Coast were often rigorous and demanding, yet highly contentious.  Keith418 has also documented thinkers on both the radical right and the far left often comparing those thinkers to the problematic thought in the Occult community.  The parallels are discomforting to all involved. This interview goes into territory of both my interview series so it will be considered part of both. 

Skepoet: You and I have been talking about the way class affects groups in ways that people want to remain silent on.   You often talk about this by comparing the left, particularly the old Maoists, to people in various occult communities.  What do you think the parallels are and why do you think people are so unwilling to realistically talk about class?

Keith418: Class is just a huge taboo in America. People usually act as though class either doesn’t exist or -if they acknowledge it at all – insist that it isn’t influential. Many seem to assume that everyone has some
kind of claim on being “middle class.” But the determining features of social class are as important as consciousness of them is repressed. This kind of “occult influence” should influence occultists more, but
since most of the people in the occult community are more invested in escaping from reality that examining it it’s not surprising that class and the ontology of personal taste isn’t a bigger topic.

The remaining revolutionary communists and Maoists have abandoned class consciousness and class discussions, I suspect, because these topics are rejected by their audience. Like the occultists, people just find these conversations too painful. It reminds people of a kind of grim objective reality – the way they appreciate or don’t appreciate things, the way they dress, act, read, work, enjoy the arts, etc. is less a matter of personal choice than anyone wants to believe. Those on the left, Maoists included, never want to contradict and dismiss the “American Dream” of endless social advancement. Telling people who are working class that their children and grandchildren will be working class too – that they won’t advance into the middle class and beyond – is just too painful a conversation to have.

I would have hoped that occultists outside of the United States, in Europe and elsewhere, might be more amendable to looking at the way class has an impact on occultism and paganism, but this hasn’t happened. Again, I think people see occult work as a kind of respite or refuge from these sorts of problems. It’s too bad, but I, along with some other people, have been trying to get people to look at these questions for years and no one I know has gotten very far.

Any discussion of social class carries with the threat of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “symbolic violence.” This violence reminds people who of is on the top and who is on the bottom. People seek to avoid this kind of violence and they avoid discussions that remind them of the real power relationships that are revealed through it. At the same time, uncovering power relations and examining them requires that we ”go there.” This kind of “uncovering” is essential to any occult work - which is always about making the secret or concealed known. I suspect that very little really important occult work is being done right now because people are unable to risk this kind of symbolic violence. “As above, so below.” If people can’t, or won’t. bring
themselves to look at how their class influences and determines their tastes and values then how can they ever be expected to do higher occult work?

Skepoet: How can they be expected to do much of any kind of honest work?  This brings me to another question, a lot of times organizations–let’s say an O.T.O Lodge or a chapter of the SPUSA–have leadership that systematically refuses to engage in conversations that would make them more sound.  Sometimes you see the leadership refusing to raise dues even when members are willing to pay it. Sometimes you see a refusal to engage honestly dealing with critiques and using them for improvement. Do you think this is related to class functions? Or is there something else at play?

Keith418: I think the contradiction exists between the basic materials – which are very critical of middle class values, investments, and beliefs - and the people running these organization who, in many cases, are in charge simply because they have attained to stable, middle class existences. How can they then struggle against their own values and their own ontology? Socialism and Thelema are both revolutionary ideologies that have become co-opted by reformists and people who believe – whether they will admit it or not – in a gradualist approach.

I often think that these groups become infused with reformist and revisionist tendencies when the status quo is seen as  acceptable to the people involved. Socialism isn’t a life or death matter now for people in the West – neither are most Thelemites really all that unhappy with their own status quo. The impetus for a radical change can only arrive when people are really profoundly unhappy with the way things are – and are ready to advance and support a deep criticism of the status quo. Until that point, the reformists and revisionists are likely to be in charge. Aleister Crowley was nauseated with his contemporaries and his society, but today’s Thelemites simply are not. Lenin and Mao were bound and determined to overthrow their societies - but today’s socialists? Not so much. The reformists and gradualists in both camps are naturally going to be afraid of the real thing – and the more they want to accommodate themselves to the status quo, the less interested they are going to be in challenging it with either Thelema or socialism.

Now, certain individuals may reject this migration away from a real challenge, but these same individuals are very likely to be in conflict with those seeking only reform and those adopting a revisionist line. Until those opposing the revisionist line hit a critical point in either their numbers (with the socialists) or the extent and degree of their influence (with the Thelemites), the chances of them changing anything are pretty low.

Skepoet: To focus on matters of spiritually for a minute.  Why do you so many Thelemites try to maintain links to other religions, or, in the particular case I thinking about, to Buddhism.   What is that about?

Keith418: They are threatened by the Thelemic materials and are seeking to dilute them with older, or other systems and ideologies that they think express values they are more comfortable with. Most of the people calling themselves Thelemites really have grave misgivings and conflicts about Thelema and what Crowley actually taught. Anyone looking at the discourse within the Thelemic community will immediately see evidence of this kind of conflict. Mixing in other religions and systems is a way to calm that sense of conflict and contradiction.

Many Westerners see Buddhism, or want to see Buddhism, as being a tolerant, liberal, non-judgmental “progressive” system – with an exotic and aesthetically appealing flavor that entices people who reject traditional Western religions. The people in the Thelemic community are just as susceptible to this kind of approach to Buddhism as anyone else is. Crowley himself rejected Buddhism, but the people you are talking about usually insist that he didn’t understand it as well as they do.

Skepoet: My experience with Buddhism is that most people–in America and in Asia-don’t really take the work it requires to meet the goals seriously, and in Euro-American also tend to see it as a pre-cursor to post-structural humanism.  I remember listening to a Dhamma speech by an Ajahn who said that “Most Americans get their Buddhism from William James. They don’t see that the interconnectedness was NOT a good thing.”  It strikes me as something similar to what you see as going on with Thelema.  Are most Thelemites looking at Crowley through Gerald Gardner or pop psychology books about the Dalai Lama?

Keith418: The irony here is acute when you consider that Crowley wrote Magick Without Tears in order to lay out his ideas in the clearest, simplest language he could. His searing disagreements with equality, democracy, as well as his support for selfishness, his rejection of herd thinking,  etc. are all to be found there  - expressed in utterly unambiguous language. Yet, modern Thelemites still need “beginner
books” to “understand Thelema.” My feeling is that they want to be reassured and provided with ways to avoid Crowley’s harsh and uncompromising criticisms of the values they regard as “common sense” – and which they accept as so natural that they aren’t even characterized as an ideology they can recognize as such. When you reach an impasse like that, a “lack of agreement” often is phrased as a “lack of understanding.”

Both Buddhism and Thelema are expected to conform to what people already believe – rather than the other way around. The project goes from changing the individual to changing the ideology – and anything can be enlisted in that task. This is revisionism.

Skepoet: Why are they Thelemites then? There are tons of religions based off of watered down versions of Crowley already?  Essentially Gardnerian Wicca is seems to have more than a little relationship as does Scientology.

Keith418: These are questions we often ask ourselves. I think one explanation is that the smaller wiccan groups are often poorly organized and don’t have the same kind of structure the Order does. I also suspect that people are attracted to Thelema  - sometimes from an aesthetic sense - and often get very involved with the group and its social dynamics before they realize the full implications in the basic materials. They
then have to leave the group or stay and seek to change it into something they can accept. This situation tends to make the community dysfunctional. You get people who have been involved for many years, and who are even in leadership positions, who evidence a profound distaste for Crowley and the basics of Thelema.They resent being in this situation and they can’t get out of it. They have often invested too much time and emotional energy to start over with anything else.

Skepoet: That sounds like cognitive dissonance pure and simple.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to erect barriers to entry?

Keith418: But how many people would that bar? Who would erect the barriers? If most of the people, and the leaders, are in denial about this process and these conflicts, then no one would see the need. Besides, the confused and conflicted need allies to help them reconcile the material to their own values and demands. Barriers to entry would deprive them of friends who would share their perspective.

The middle class people in the occult community always seek middle allies and defend them. Part of this is a comfort issue – they want to be around people like them. But it’s also very practical. They need people who can show up on time, pay dues, and be “responsible.” If they tell these potential allies to adopt Thelema or leave, then their potential allies and friends will all be gone.

Additionally, many of the working class and lumpen members are using Thelema as a kind of class ladder. In some cases, it mimics the ”academic” communities they are excluded from. In other cases, they nurse an inchoate hope that an involvement in occultism will somehow help them “move up.” Often “mentoring” in the occult community is really about the middle class people imparting their skills and values to the people under them. When the working class people reach a new point in their social aspirations they understand that occult activity isn’t helping them any longer – and could even be seen as a detriment - and they often quit.

Skepoet: Does this lead organizations to have sort of natural life cycles?

Keith418: I hesitate to say too much about this – as we don’t always know the twists and turns, as well as the chance for schisms and rebirths. Many of the Maoist groups collapsed and  - after suffering schisms – then coalesced into other formations and died. How long can a commitment to a revolutionary ideology and practice be maintained? Do people “age out” of this kind of thing naturally? What are the exceptions?

A Thelemic leader told me once that he was convinced that magick was ”a young man’s game.” This could explain the older leaders moving away from a more confrontational and critical POV. It could also explain
the move towards accommodation and revisionism that we see over and over again on the left.

Skepoet: Do you seem similar happenings on the right?

Keith418: On the radical right? Certainly. Both the radical left and the radical right are united in their rejection of the status quo and share at least an initial disinclination to accept reformist and gradualist measures. I have observed the same aging out process on the far right. As people get older they retreat from the fray and are more willing to make compromises. Some, however, do not.

How much are these struggles tempered and influenced by the historical moment they find themselves in? In an era of rising expectations, revolt and radical changes seem more imminent that they might in an periods of lowered expectations. These factors might change the way people decide to compromise, or even abandon, their efforts to create change.

Skepoet: I have been wondering about this as well. Is this push for “beginnner’s books” in Thelema coming from below or above or both?  In the OTO there has been much discussion about the difficulty of getting texts out, but there seems to be a new beginners book every few months. Is it a simple profit movement or is it encouraged by the leadership?

Keith418: I think we see the “beginner book” phenomena arising from a number of places. First, most of the pagan/occult community isn’t well educated.This means they have few tools to bring to advanced occult texts and Crowley’s erudition is almost impossible for them to penetrate. Second, the “beginner books” are quite biased in that they seek to tone down Crowley’s radical and transgressive positions and tacitly support a reading of Thelema that conforms more with liberal left viewpoints. The people who don’t need the bowdlerized beginner books, and who reject them and depend purely on Crowley are often at odds with those who are dependent on people “translating” Crowley for them.

The leaders of all the Thelemic communities are engaged in an ideological migration away from Crowley. This migration is more or less explicitly acknowledged by the various leaders, depending on the group, but it’s a profound change and there are no exceptions. The ”beginner books” are part of this, as is the general disinclination to engage with Crowley’s transgressive teachings deeply and directly.There’s also trend towards an emphasis on a kind of “empty formalism” that also serves to distract people from the challenging material that troubles them and threatens herd values. Instead of thinking about what the rituals mean, they focus on endless discussions of line readings, stage direction and an ever-increasing kind of Talmudic minutiae.

Skepoet: In a way that reminds of undergraduate texts on critical theory which clean up the problematic bits.  Funny how universal those tensions and tactics are.  Do you think a lot of Occultists confuse lore trivia with education?

Keith418: In the occult community, people tend to play little games with gematria and I often suspect that this has become a pseudo-intellectual distraction and a way to avoid looking at more transgressive problems – as well as a way to dodge addressing practical concerns. Explaining, for example, how “120″ is the “secret number” of one ritual or another is a lot easier than figuring out how to raise money from people who don’t feel like they should contribute, or looking at why the Crowley books have gone out of print, or why none of the major Thelemic groups owns any temple spaces. You can always find people willing to have a discussion about the former topic - it’s much harder to find anyone interested in pursuing the latter subjects.

I also compare this kind of distraction and avoidance to differing ideas of what “freedom” means. To too many, freedom means nothing more than a “freedom” to choose between available and recognized options. Very few want to criticize the range of options and this limited definition of freedom at all. When Crowley is employed to criticize the nature of the status quo and modern institutions and values – democracy, egalitarianism, etc. – he is rejected. I see this rejection on the left as people move towards revisionism, compromise, and accommodation.

Skepoet:Or in other words, moving towards middle class liberalism.   You like to get people to read Paul Fussell’s book on class which talks about how there is a drift towards the lower middle class over time in middle class culture.   Do you see that as being related to this?

Keith418: My effort to get people to read Fussell, which is a sort of “beginner book” version of Bourdieu’s work (irony!), was to attack the denial of social class and the way people tended to dismiss its steady and determining influence. I noticed that after reading the book, they didn’t argue with me about the existence and importance of class any longer. They didn’t want to discuss the topic, but at least they no longer denied it. Instead, people used Fussell as a kind of ”aspirational” guide. One reader told me that, after reading the book, he threw away all his short-sleeved shirts with collars. Rather than rejecting middle class values, I actually think most occultists aspire to them – or seek to preserve them in the face of threats or criticism.

Crowley was extremely critical of the middle class. His kind of class criticism is rejected by nearly all modern Thelemites. This migration away from what he taught isn’t accidental.

Skepoet: What do you think was particular to Crowley’s background that enabled him to be so transgressive?

Keith418:Some of the clues may be in his strict upbringing. If he was able to withstand that kind of effort at forced conformity, then there is very little that he wasn’t capable of questioning later on. Paradoxically, an overly permissive and undisciplined environment may produce people more inclined to unquestioning conformity and herd thinking. It’s not hard to see the link between a personal insistence on independence and a corresponding cultivation of self-discipline. Crowley himself wrote that 90% (“at a guess”) of Thelema was self-discipline. What happens when you have a generation or two with no strong sense of self-discipline? How do people then relate to Thelema and what can they really do with it? The only options they may have is to try to turn it into something else. The problem is that Crowley’s writings are both extant and voluminous and they explicitly refute these kinds of substitution strategies and revisionism.

The left has the same problems. Marx recognized that the revolution needed a trained, disciplined working class. If this revolutionary class doesn’t exist, and if people do not arise with the kinds of qualities, then the revolution can’t happen. The real revolutions needs a kind of subject. It can’t “make do” with anything or anyone.

Skepoet: Which makes the practice of yoga and some of the more extreme disciplinary practices in Crowley’s writings makes sense. I can’t remember the specific Liber, but the practice of limiting yourself and making your infractions with a razor seemed like sort of effective if extreme practice. I have noticed I haven’t seen a lot of Thelemites with the razor marks though.   Do you think commodity comforts have something to do with ignoring this?

Keith418: There are ways for performing that practice (Liber Liber III vel Jugorum) without the razor. Some use a rubber band or make lighter scratches. Real magical work takes a serious cultivation of self-discipline and this is harder and harder for people – as you suggest – raised in a consumer culture. I suspect that for many people  Thelemic and magical attainment is more of  an egalitarian, religious entitlement than something they have to struggle and really work for. Thelema is, in any case, either a spur for greater levels of self-discipline or, in more and more cases, a rationale for avoiding self-discipline and a spiritual ratification of the present personal status quo.

Skepoet: Do you think this is similar to how so many American Buddhists seem to reject even the idea of Enlightenment as a real possibility that would change things?  Many Buddhist teachers have complained about this to me.

Keith418: We live in an age in which it’s harder and harder for people to imagine alternatives. This kind of difficulty afflicts both political and religious thinking. The choices become narrower, the option diminish, and people are less and less willing to ponder, or support, radical alternatives. Leaders  - in any movement – have to recognize these circumstances and address them forthrightly. It’s not something that people generally want to be reminded of.It’s certainly depressing, and there are no easy answers or quick fixes.

Skepoet: Recently you have been talking the difference between sophistication and raw intelligence in some private conversations we have. You see a lot of lack of sophistication in the dialogue. Why do you think that is?

Keith418: It’s not difficult to see a difference between raw intelligence and sophisticated thinking. There are plenty of bright people who aren’t very sophisticated and any number of sophisticated people who aren’t
bright. A major factor here is how much cultural capital people possess and much of that is due to their social class. iI you meet a person who is really sophisticated and, at the same time, not exactly a genius, then it’s usually because they come from an upper class background. If occultists emerge out of the working class, the lumpen, and the lower middle class, then they usually aren’t very sophisticated and their occult interests may reflect an effort to find a  sort of substitute for the kind of cultural capital they have been denied. On the other hand, very bright occultists are usually painfully unsophisticated. If they are stuck in IT jobs, or other fields that require a certain amount of focused intelligence but do not demand any sort of advanced cultural capital, then they too will be deprived of many essential tools.

It’s easy to find people in the occult community rejecting deep, sophisticated approaches to occultism, but for an individual without a great deal of cultural capital, I am afraid that most of what someone like Crowley wrote will simply be impenetrable. Again, this may be why we see the endless popularity of one “beginner book” after another. These appallingly pedestrian texts are nothing other than attempts to recast advanced and challenging occultism for the unsophisticated and for those who struggle with Crowley’s erudition. His sophistication means that, for them, his work is opaque.

In addition, collecting books, and obsessing over them, is vastly different from studying them closely… and even close study is different from practice and application. We often see occultists fetishizing and aspiring to academic careers and I think, for many, this reveals their own transparent class aspirations. Unfortunately, modern academic work, in the humanities, is often nothing more than increasingly crude efforts at social engineering along liberal-left and humanistic lines. This kind of indoctrination leads people away from taking anyone as transgressive as Crowley was too seriously and it tends to make people believe that the “safe” and/or “respectable” way to investigate occultism is in some kind of purely academic approach. I kept waiting for people to return from advanced academic work to lead the occult community, but this hasn’t happen so far and I am disinclined to ever expect it now. the work they do in academic setting devalues the occult community they came out of. They don’t go back to it after being “trained.”

Skepoet: Are their thinkers, other than Crowley, do you think people avoid because of their humanistic bias?

Keith418: The contemporary occult climate is very influenced by PC thinking and it carefully avoids any challenge to contemporary taboos. Crowley, for example, had nothing but praise for Nietzsche. He’s a saint in Crowley’s Gnostic Mass and is also referred to by Crowley as a ”prophet.” But, at best, most people calling themselves Thelemites can barely handle lesser interpreters like Ayn Rand. The closest any thinker gets to explicitly challenging the value of democracy, equality, compassion and any of the other mainstays of liberal humanism, the more those in the occult community seem to instinctively steer clear. If you try to illustrate Crowley’s criticism of equality and democracy with reference to similar thinkers, you can count on receiving  immediate push-back or worse.

This part of a movement away from the kinds of transgressive explorations that were more common 20+ years ago. People in the ’80s explored all sorts of extreme ideas and radical thinkers. Amok Press and other publishers carried shocking and disturbing books and people were more open to these kinds of explorations. Now, folks are really reluctant to push the boundaries. I think this indicates the way they have been indoctrinated to unquestioningly accept a placid, stable, liberal-left world view and its corresponding ideologies. If Crowley is seen as deviating from those agendas, which any close reading of his texts will immediately prove that he does, then he has to be altered to be suit current fashionable beliefs and values… or tossed under the bus.

Skepoet: There seems to be a movement to make Nietzsche safe as well.  So many people trying to render him a humanist.  It’s frustrating. Why do you think Ayn Rand is so popular in those circles?  Elitism for the masses?

Keith418: I don’t want to suggest that Rand is all that popular in the occult community. I know only a small handful of people who are fans, but I suspect that she makes a kind of derivative Nietzschean system of
values more palatable for the middle classes and for those who haven’t really studied Western philosophy and political science that deeply. You need a background in Western philosophy to grasp Nietzsche and you don’t need that at all for Rand.

Nietzsche is too important for people in academia to ignore, and too explosive and too threatening to approach on his own terms. Therefore, some alteration and dilution must be attempted. It’s unfortunate, but in the current climate it is not surprising. This kind of reaction is the same when it comes to Crowley in the Thelemic community and also looks like the hegemonic push towards revisionism on the left. It’s universal.

Skepoet: What, if any, hope do you have for a change in the atmosphere of the occult community?

Keith418: I don’t have a lot of hope at the moment. I once thought that a kind of Internet-fueled occult cultural revolution might occur, with many people joining in an advancing kind of exploration and discussion that would be assisted by all the new access to information that was once difficult or even impossible to find. Instead, I think, occultists were presented with a whole series of problems that they had been steadily avoiding before – ideological conflicts and fractures, educational deficiencies, a history of organizational failures, etc. This had led to a kind of stalemate in which very little improves and conversations become curtailed or are nothing more than the rote repetitions of calming platitudes, dominated by the lowest common denominator.

I also didn’t count on the new kind of conformity orientation we see so much of – as well as the results of the poor educations most people receive now. When you combine ignorance and herd thinking, a reluctance to truly “question authority,” it’s hard to see too much progress on the immediate horizon.

But who can predict an event? A trigger might come along, or an influence might appear, that proves catastrophic to the current status quo. Until then we will continue to find more teachers under the ground than walking around on it. For the motivated, the possibilities that exist now could constitute a “golden age.” I am encouraging those who are ready to take full advantage of it.

Skepoet: Anything to say in closing?

Keith418: ”The spiritual decay of the earth is so advanced that people risk exhausting that reserve of spiritual force which enables them just to see and take stock of this decay [...]. This simple observation has nothing to do with cultural pessimism: for in every corner of the world the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, the contemptuous suspicion of everything which is creative and free, have reached such proportions that such childlike expressions as pessimism and optimism have long become laughable.”

- Heidegger

Religious Ethnography Series can be found here, here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, here, and here. 

Marginalia on Radical Thinking Series can be found here, here, and here.