The Alchemical Panic Part 1 [TE]

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes, 30 seconds. Contains 1300 words

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter thing about fringe culture and how it got this way.

I'm your host Stephen and we’re going to talk about digging into the roots of fringe culture.

Isaac Casaubon proved the Corpus Hermeticum, a foundational text of Alchemy, was not as ancient a text as generally assumed during the Renaissance but dated between 100 and 300 CE.

Culture is syncretic.

People share ideas and language and that creates flows and lineages that can be traced to their sources and influences.

These are often not precise, but can still teach us a great deal about what something means and how it changes over time.

I wanted to start this with the Corpus because it’s “debunking” is a useful frame of reference. Before Casaubon it was assumed to be very ancient, perhaps even older than the books of Moses in the Hebrew Bible.

By looking at the language and ideas involved, he was able to show that it was a text written in conversation with Roman Empire era Platonic, Jewish, Christian thinking built on top of a more ancient Egyptian foundation.

We’ve been quietly involved in a similar project on a larger scale. I want to clarify that process and bring it to the surface.

New Age Alchemy, The Satanic Panic, and The Perennial Awakening

My big pictures theory here is there’s a kind of genetic tree of ideas that are coming to a head in politics today and its roots are deep. For the movement I’m mainly interested in investigating them going back to about the Age of Discovery.

Qanon was built on a big pile of lies but I think it got one thing exactly right: As a movement it was a kind of digital revival for living religion that’s been kind of trying to be born for the last few centuries.

The Great Awakening is a series of revivals in American and British culture predating the American Revolution. I’m mainly familiar with the second Great Awakening a century later, but there are canonically 3 of them.

It’s my belief that the mid 60s through the mid 70s was a New Age Great Awakening

These are historic moments of intense, personal revelatory possibility. People get the direct experience of something and it pushes them to fight against tradition and dogmatic thinking.

Our times are no different.

Arational content dressed up as Revelation motivates people to try to bring in a new world.

Eventually, so far at least, passions kind of burn themselves out and institutions win in the long run until another moment of possibility breaks through.

Because of the apocalyptic narrative structure of Christianity, those brought up in Christendom often carry that expectations of Final Judgement with them even when they're discarded other expectations of their previous religion.

This tendency has been very syncretic and deeply led and shaped by the technology of the day in a way Marshall McLuhan would appreciate.

Nothing Ever Goes Away

In a world where communication is mediated by print it’s much harder for any ideas whatsoever to be lost.

In large part because of that durability we’ve built a vast archipelago of rabbit holes from rejected or suppressed knowledge.

It’ll be interesting to see how much of society’s pivot to video and dying Internet changes that over time.

Because you're only every one book away from an idea that’s good or bad coming back into circulation if the right person gets a hold of it, there’s a churning remix culture that people can react to and reappropriate for themselves.

Our inability to forget once it’s written down causes all kinds of weird shit to crop up as people react within and without their culture.

Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophy is quietly one of the most significant and influential ideologies in the last 200 years. By remixing everything into a mostly coherent framework, it made it the easy source for anyone else interested in syncretic mysticism.

She was a significant input in the volkish movement that would eventually give us Nazism.

The only way to understand it is with the word milieu. A vast, asymmetrical network of loosely related ideas that become intertwined as they’re remixed together and apart.

Blavatsky’s ideas influenced the people who influenced Hitler, Gandhi, and through George Adamski the modern UFO movement.

But she was herself stuck in the shadow of deeper systemic forces.

Isis Unveiled was retromodernist occultism. A kind of backward looking rebellion against the rising tide of the era.

To borrow a couplet from Aleister Crowley that gets to the heart of it: We place no reliance on virgin or pigeon. Our method is science our aim is religion.

And all of this existing in the context of colonialism and empire. Technologist of extraction and conformity.

The Dawn of Everything

Davids Wengrow and Graeber wrote a book on the multiplicity of societies that avoided building up empires before Graeber’s death. It’s an interesting, if troubled, book and there’s one section that’s stuck in my mind since reading it.

They speculate that the European Enlightenment was sparked by intellectuals reacting to indigenous criticism of European culture during the age of discovery.

I need to verify that a bit, but let’s take it as more or less true and I think we have the beginnings of a framework to understand what’s going on here.

The human need to be special is deeply rooted and when the violence of colonization held up a mirror to who Europeans were many of them very much balked at this. They sought to fashion a new idea of what made them special.

You can see this need, operationalized by advertising today, all over the fringe.

Join this group and you'll get superpowers. That one will teach you the secret wisdom of the ancients science is too arrogant to believe. Join this third and your frail body will be healed.

Personal and impersonal forces alike sublimated into hooks for grifters to exploit, often turning their victims into tomorrow’s exploiters. A self sustaining cycle.

And it’s that cycle, a generational curse, that needs broken.

We literally don’t have to do capitalism or colonialism.

We can explore the edges of consciousness without celling cigarettes to kids.

But we need to remember and understand the world we’ve inherited and treat it an awful lot wiser than we’ve done so far.

I know where to start with this. We won’t know if this idea is viable enough to be worth discussing until we dig more.

Wrapping Up

So, this is a thing again.

Every time I’ve failed to keep a schedule and promised to do better I meant it when I wrote it but things would get in the way. So I’m not going to promise shit here.

I’m interested in this. And I have some ideas where to start digging deeper.

I want the Trenchant Edges to make enough that I don’t need to work anywhere else if I don't want to. But that means producing a lot more and higher work.

Honestly, fuck all that. I like doing it so I will.

I suspect the place to start here is with an obscure source written by one of the most famous men in world history: Christopher Columbus wrote a “Book of Prophecies” about how his success in finding the new world was integral to total human salvation.

Doesn’t it seem like the fact the guy who kicked off European global colonization wrote a bunch of end times prophecies seem… significant?

Something like 1/4 of people in the US believe we’re living in the end times. This is not an accident. It’s the result of a century or two of very motivated propagandists working very hard to spread it.

Gotta love missionaries. Like happy Sisyphus.

Alright. What's it for now.

I think we'll be back tomorrow. I have more to say.

If you enjoyed this, please share it with one other person who you think would get a kick out of it. See you soon.

-SF