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Inspired by the recent trolling:
Welcome to the counter culture. Please keep in mind that we are not realy the counter cultuer and if you say anything to subversive your threads will be locked and/or deleted. What the fuck I thought the counter culture was about extreme ideas and opinions. I was clearly wrong. It seems that the counter culture is policed just as well as regular culture, but at least your free..... TO DO WHAT WE TELL YOU.
I thought it might be interesting to look at the concept of "the counter culture" and how it relates to magic and occultism. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that magical practice is automatically situated within a vaguely defined movement called "the counter culture". Monkeyboy up there doesnt even consider that people posting in this forum might not actively identify as "the counter culture", and automatically accuses everyone here en masse of somehow not keeping it real, as if we've somehow betrayed a certain set of vaguely defined counter cultural values, that presumably, simply by identifying as magicians, we must obviously adhere to. Granted, the above example is particularly extreme and fuckwitted one, but it illustrates a general theme running through much occultism that magical practice is a subversive practice.
I think to some extent it is. The act of empowering yourself to take personal responsibility for your life and your experience of reality is a fairly subversive thing. By and large, we're not really encouraged to do this sort of thing by the consumerist culture we belong to. The decision to not spend your saturday evening as a passive spectator of celebrity big brother, or whatever, and engage with some form of empowering magical practice instead could well be considered "counter cultural", in that it's behaviour that runs counter to a lot of the lifestyle messages we receive within mainstream western culture.
However, I think problems start to occur when people lose site of the purpose of a "counter culture", which is surely to provide challenging ideas that will "counter" competing ideas within popular culture that might be considered harmful or disempowering. As I understand it, the purpose of counter culture should be to actively subvert mainstream culture along more positive and individually empowering lines. It's something that should engage continually with mainstream culture in order to create change within it.
Does popular occultism, and the "counter culture" associated with it, really do that? I'm not so sure that it does. To some extent, it seems to prefer to exist in a comfortable little ghetto and avoid actually engaging with the outside world as much as possible. In many cases, occultism and the practice of magic, within western culture, could quite reasonably be defined as a tiny subgenre within the goth subculture. By and large, it's not something that reaches out into the world. It's not something that engages in a dialogue with the wider culture it is allegedly countering.
The notion of the magician as "the outsider" is prevalent in the occult world. The solitary figure who operates outside of mainstream culture, is aloof from it, alone in a dark tower with his impenetrable books on the nightside of eden, concerning himself with astral mysteries that would be incomprehensible to the man in the chip shop. I'm not sure what this achieves.
In my own practice, I'm very interested in subverting these ideas and situating my magic as something strongly community based. For me, magic is something that constantly engages with the world around me, it's intimately concerned with the minutae of day-to-day life, its about doing things for other people, connecting to the landscape around me, and bringing the magical into the everyday world. It's quite situationist, in a way. A conversation takes place between the magical worldview and mainstream culture, and to my mind, this is much more subversive than standing apart from the world.
Phex had an interesting point in response to monkeyboy's dreary amalgam of RAW, Leary, and cohorts:
Writing like this only serves to keep 'the counterculture', 'the underground' or whatever stuck in its self-referential dark ages, a loop of the same ideas by the same thinkers being played back to an uncritical audience eager to be told that everything's okay and it'll all get better if we just hang on another seven years.
I really have problems with all of these things that have formed the established pseudo-occult counterculture for the past 40 years, because I'm not convinced they are really countering much of anything anymore. All of these ideas seem to have solidified into a lifestyle option, where you're invited to adopt a series of alternative ideas about reality, but you don't really have to do anything about it. It's enough to just think in a certain way, slap yourself on the back, and pity the uneducated, unliberated denizens of mainstream culture.
I don't much like it, and certainly wouldnt position myself and my own practice within "the counter culture" as such. I think it's much more productive and subversive to try and be a magician within ordinary mainstream culture and see what the ramifications of that are.
More to follow when I get a chance. |
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