Today is July 23, 2026, which means it is one of the holiest of holidays in my religion:
Robert Anton Wilson Day
Back when I was managing editor at this company’s predecessor, Liberty Island Books, I wrote this on July 23, 2019 about my favorite author:
In Cosmic Trigger he writes about how on this day in 1973 he experienced some kind of contact with an entity. He explains how over the years he’s held many hypotheses about what it may have been, ranging from aliens to spirits to dead people, to just being a bit crazy and hallucinating. Taking an agnostic approach to the experience is akin to what he advocated throughout his books and talks; that we should be skeptical about both our own BS and other people’s. He was fond of noting that “BS” was a good shortening for “belief system.”
Yes, today we celebrate the occult ritual which may or may not have inspired Wilson to become the great author and philosopher he became, whose ideas laid some of the foundations of my career and whole life now.
I’m an occultist today because of Wilson’s work.
And it began back in 2003 when I was in college and acquired a little 2-disc DVD set which introduced me to the ideas of Wilson, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, chaos magician Grant Morrison, filmmaker Kenneth Anger, and the one whose teachings and philosophy provided the foundation to them all, the self-proclaimed Great Beast Aleister Crowley, the most important, influential, and notorious occultist of the 20th century.
First, let’s define terms:
What is “the occult” and what does it mean to identify as an occultist?
What exactly was so special about Aleister Crowley?
A lot of people tend to think that occultism is synonymous with Satanism and that it’s all about worshipping demons and casting black magick spells to curse people.
However, when you open Crowley’s magnum opus Magick Book 4 then you’ll find something very different: a whole lot of these “spells” seem to sound an awful lot like prayers.
Why would the Tetragrammaton, the holiest name of God in Judaism, be so central in a book by a supposed Satanist?
Why all this talk of heavenly beings and the need to call forth one’s Holy Guardian Angel? My goodness, that’s a lot of Hebrew there!
“Occult” means hidden. And what is “hidden” is something very specific and it’s what we are celebrating today. I will use the most clinical term:
Entities
That’s the big taboo of the occult and of Wilson’s memoir Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati, my favorite book.
So many people do not want to consider the possiblity that “entities” — commonly characterized as ghosts, spirits, gods, angels, demons, extraterrestrials, time travelers, pick whatever label you’d like — do actually exist as opposed to being desperate, delusional creations of one’s imagination.
And they want to insist that anyone who would claim to communicate with an “entity” must surely be insane. Only schizophrenic people think they’re talking to spirits, right?
No.
Merely “hearing voices” is not enough for a Schizophrenia diagnosis or to be locked away forever. (I assure you I’ve talked with both my therapist and psychiatrist about this and they assure me I do not exhibit the symptoms.)
The number of people who experience some form of communication with seemingly spiritual forces is much higher than most would suspect. The “Hearing Voices Movement” reports that anywhere from 3% to 10% of the population have reported these kinds of experiences of interactions with beings seemingly on other planes of existence.
So after 23 years now of exploring the occult and using Book 4 as an actual practical guidebook through the spiritual realms, to me, this is what occultism is really all about:
If you do these rituals, then you will get these results, and then it will mean making contact with something on the other side.
The seemingly old-fashioned tools of a magick circle, wand, cup, sword, disk, Bible, and all the conventional tropes of wizardry will actually work if you take the very long amounts of time it takes to learn how to use them.
Here’s the most important essay I’ve ever published on Substack about using ceremonial magick as the most effective PTSD treatment ever:
For Wilson, after performing a ritual, he encountered what appeared to him as an extraterrestrial intelligence from Sirius, though he came to doubt that initial presentation, realizing that this experience of a shaman contacting a spirit happens again and again throughout history.
For Crowley, his most famous occult experience meant the contact with an entity he called Aiwass, which reportedly dictated to him a document known as The Book of the Law, a sort of prophetic poem. For those who follow Thelema, the religion built from Crowley’s teachings, they regard this as a holy book and the foundation of their faith.
So was Crowley telling the truth that The Book of the Law came from Aiwass? Or was he just making it up like he made up so many embellishments and fabrications of himself?
Was Wilson telling the truth about what happened to him on July 23, 1973? Or was this just more clever satire from the co-author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy and the co-creator of infamous pranking collective Operation Mindfuck?
After 23 years now of pondering these possibilities and weighing the evidence, I do think that Wilson and Crowley were being honest and not bullshitting. I do think they made contact with spiritual “entities” which we still cannot understand.
Why?
Because you can test their methods for yourself and see if they work or not. And they do.
Once you realize that, then what Wilson and Crowley did is no longer as extraordinary as it might seem upon first encounter.
While it is seemingly rare to make contact with a spiritual being, it’s very established within the history of human experience that this happens and that we can even cause it to happen through ritual.
Crowley was just building on the foundations of those who came before him in developing these techniques and traditions for how to engage with spiritual entites.
His approach derived from his involvement in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which drew on the angelic communications reportedly experienced by John Dee and his medium Edward Kelly starting in 1582 and that led to the development of Enochian Magic. This system relies on invoking angelic beings in the language reportedly spoken by the biblical prophet Enoch. It is very complicated and I haven’t yet invested the time to learn it but hope to get around to it eventually. I’m intimidated by the amount of memorization needed.
As with Crowley, having pondered the possibilities for 23 years now, I do tend to think Dee and Kelly were sincere in their experiences, in spite of Kelly’s history as a con artist. If the system they developed was worthless then people would not still be using it centuries later and taking it seriously.
Because, again, historically claiming to speak with angels or demons or any variety “spirits” is more common than people realize, and not at all only the domain of the schizophrenic.
So understood this way, occultism in the Western esoteric tradition, largely defined by the transmission of knowledge from John Dee through to Aleister Crowley and on to today, is primarily about invoking angelic spirits in order to engage directly with God so that you can do the will of God, while also countering the many dark, demonic spirits wandering the earth, causing chaos.
This tradition goes back further than the Renaissance and back into the ancient world. The Jewish mystical traditions and Enoch-based legends which informed Dee’s approach go back to the Second Temple period. Preceding them come the legends of King Solomon, understood in our tradition as one of the Bible’s magicians.
The Egyptian mystical themes codified in the Hermetic tradition run parallel to the Biblical ideas in Western Esotericism and they originated more than 4,000 years ago.
It took me a long time of exploring Crowley before I finally realized, “Oh. Is occultism just a revival of ancient Egyptian religion?” These ideas and techniques for engaging with spiritual “entities” have been understood in various forms going back to Ancient Egypt. And trace them back even further and you get their original expression in Shamanism, the original technology for invoking, binding, and banishing spirits both friendly and harmful.
So all that to say, the tradition of Western occultism has a history and a lineage which can be traced back to the ancient world. And it integrates together the wisdom and practices across Pagan, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and secular traditions.
And the purpose remains the same from then to today: how we can use rituals to interact with the spiritual realm in positive ways, which usually entail the invoking of angelic spirits or the casting off of dark spirits. The rituals which I do every day all fall into one of those two categories. I’m either calling forth heavenly spirits to heal me from pain within or to protect me from pain outside.
Chapter 21 of Book 4 is titled “Of Black Magic; of Pacts with the Devil; of the Main Types of the Operations of Magick Art; of Necromancy; and of the Powers of the Sphinx.”
The first two sentences on page 275 are foundational for understanding Crowley properly and for avoiding the common mistakes many people make when they begin exploring these esoteric subjects:
“As was said at the opening of the second chapter, the Single Supreme Ritual is the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is the raising of the complete man in a vertical straight line. Any deviation from this line tends to become black magic. Any other operation is black magic.”
What specifically is Crowley talking about here?
He gives some examples:
“There are, of course, entirely black forms of magic. To him who has not given every drop of his blood for the Cup of Babylon, all magic power is dangerous. There are even more debased and evil forms, things in themselves black. Such is the use of spiritual force to material ends. Christian Scientists, Mental Healers, Professional Diviners, Psychics and the like, are all ipso facto Black Magicians.”
Crowley also notes another key category, bolded in the original:
“Below these in one sense, yet far above them in another, are the Brothers of the Left Hand Path. These are they who “shut themselves up,” who refuse their blood to the Cup, who have trampled Love in the race for their self-aggrandizement.”
Where does this sound familiar?
Left Hand Path?
Self-aggrandizement?
Spiritual force to material ends?
Last month I wrote this essay revealing the fraudulent nature of the false spiritual teachings promulgated by Mitch Horowitz, a former occult historian-turned promoter of New Thought teachings and advocate of New Age ideas:
In the piece I laid out the evidence describing how Mitch:
Embraced the teachings of charlatan Neville Godard so deeply he tattooed the man’s face on his left bicep.
Had made a business out of selling Godard’s book as well as garbage like Think and Grow Rich and The Master Key to Riches.
Advocates for “just wishing” as his primary technique, which he claims is synonymous with historical magickal practice.
Glorifies the acquisition of material possessions, citing televangelist Oral Roberts’ acquiring a Buick so he could reach new places to preach as “everything that’s right” about American spirituality.
Calls himself “smitten” with selfishness advocate Ayn Rand on the grounds of the supposed power of her “public persona.”
Claims that Theosophy-founder Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s public persona “was her greatest work.”
Deleted my comment advocating that “love is what matters” and “truth is what matters” on his essay celebrating Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey before blocking me on Substack.
Took the quote “Mitch is solid gold” he received from the late David Lynch — whose book Catching the Big Fish he published in his former role as editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin — and repurposed it as his primary professional branding, slapping it on his Substack and the cover of his book to suggest that the greatest American filmmaker of all time endorsed Mitch’s New Thought nonsense.
Mitch has positioned himself as the most prominent apologist of New Age thinking today.
In an essay in March titled “The Case for Woo Woo,” he defined the movement as “a radically ecumenical culture of therapeutic spirituality. Its modus operandi is positive-mind metaphysics or, more commonly, Law of Attraction-manifesting—my term is selecting—concepts I both interrogate and fitfully support.”
For Mitch, 1970s New Age and 1920s New Thought are one and the same.
In my previous piece, I began with the observation about Godard because Mitch chose to throw his face at all the podcast’s viewers.
In his recent podcast discussion with my friend Jason Louv, he chose to broadcast his enthusiasm for another icon of bullshit with his t-shirt, the godmother of what we now know today as the New Age movement, Blavatsky:
In his marketing materials for his new book, Mitch has chosen to brand himself with that t-shirt of Blavatsky.
Anyone owning a Blavatsky t-shirt should feel embarrased for having burned money on acquiring clothing in celebration of one of spiritual history’s great racists and bullshit artists.
But not Mitch. He’s so proud of it that he makes it his personal branding now. And he defends Blavatsky from the charge of racism routinely leveled at his icon.
In the discussion with Jason, Mitch says “And of course the idiots think that Madam Blavatsky was somehow responsible in this mysterious way for the Third Reich. And they cite books of hers that they haven’t read and never will read like The Secret Doctrine, misunderstanding that her concept of root races is all referenced in classical Vedism.”
Jason then jumps in and says “yeah, that’s more, like, my understanding of that is more like generations of the totality of humanity on the planet. It has nothing to do with the races as people.”
Mitch then responds “Nothing whatsoever.”
Really?
Nothing whatsoever? All the historians who say that Blavatsky was a racist are idiots and we should trust the hip guy on the podcast wearing the t-shirt of her?
Well, take a look at The Secret Doctrine yourself and you be the judge of whether the concept has “nothing whatsoever” to do with races as people.
From page 421 of The Secret Doctrine, as quoted in the YouTube video above:
“No amount of culture, nor generations of training amid civilization, could raise such human specimens as the Bushmen, the Veddhas of Ceylon, and some African tribes, to the same intellectual level as the Aryans, the Semites, and the Turanians so called.”
You tell me: does it sound like Mitch is accurately characterizing the above passage which he as a self-appointed Blavatsky expert must surely know deeply?
Or here is a much more interesting question: Does Mitch choosing to downplay Blavatsky’s obvious racism perhaps have anything to do with how often he lectures for the Theosophical Society?
Here is a lecture he gave on The Secret Doctrine at the 133rd Summer National Convention of the Theosophical Society in America in 2019:
Here he is speaking for them in 2016:
Here’s a talk he also gave that year titled “H.P. Blavatsky Versus Darth Vader.” He chose to wear a Dead Kennedys shirt while presenting because that’s his “public persona,” the hip Gen-Xer punk historian who attempts to launder New Age bullshit.
And Mitch’s work for the Theosophical Society has continued. Here is an online lecture he gave two years ago:
Mitch is not a historian of Theosophy. He’s its chief PR man today.
When Crowley wrote about how “Christian Scientists, Mental Healers, Professional Diviners, Psychics and the like, are all ipso facto Black Magicians” he was talking about people like Blavatsky and now her apologist Mitch.
In 1875, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society to promote her made-up religion which represented a mish-mash blending of Eastern and Western esoteric ideas into an incomprehensible mess. She was a 19th century L. Ron Hubbard and this was her Scientology. And Mitch idolizes her.
Blavatsky claimed that her teachings came from mystical contact she had with supposed “masters” on a spiritual plane. Her ideas supposedly did not come through study and practice, but rather direct contact with entities.
She said she was clairvoyant and could see past and future, as well as perceive people’s past lives. She claimed to be able to cause objects to magically appear or to cause raps and tappings. She asserted she could magically heal people and command elemental forces. She claimed the ability to magically protect others.
To Mitch, all this crafting of a “public persona” through absurd lies amounts to “her greatest work.”
You know what I think an author’s “greatest work” should be, Mitch?
Their fucking books!
And the truth is that Blavatsky’s are plagiarized garbage promoting racism while Magick Book 4 is the greatest grimoire of all time. It contains practical exercises and rituals which anyone of any ethnicity, culture, or religion can try for themselves to see their legitimacy.
But you’ll never catch me wearing a Crowley t-shirt or getting him tattooed on my arm. One of the things that slowed down how deeply I explored Crowley for years was the simple historical fact that the man was an absolute arrogant jerk. In The Bumper Book of Magic, Alan Moore and the late Steve Moore wrote about him that “Brilliantly synthesisng occult and psychological ideas, Crowley virtually created modern magic yet his misguided self-promotion constantly overshadowed these genuine achievements.”
Crowley is deeply unlikeable personally for reasons that have filled many books.
But that’s OK, because ultimately he’s just an author, just as Wilson was just an author. These guys are not prophets to start religions, even if Crowley’s followers made the mistake of attempting it. They were flawed men like us all. They simply compiled and elaborated on spiritual tools and systems that go back thousands of years and which have endured because they continue to work.
This is very different from New Age icons that people put on t-shirts…
The image which began this essay comes near the end of my favorite book of the century, The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic. The book features multiple narratives in both prose and comics, as well as presenting a ton of esoteric material with gorgeous illustrations.
This “Lives of the Great Enchanters” series in the book presents notable figures in magic throughout history. These panels depict what happened after Crowley’s death and the two magical traditions which then emerged to fill the void.
Crowley died in 1947 and deliberately chose to encourage multiple successors. This fragmented the leadership of his organization the Ordo Templi Orientis for decades, only coming back together in the 1970s in a story my friend the late James Wasserman recounts in his memoir In the Center of the Fire: A Memoir of the Occult, 1966-1989.
The result in the Moores’ framing is that absent meaningful, structured leadership in the occult community, magical traditions devolved in two destructive directions: in the 1970s the “New Age” movement emerged in America, in the 1980s “chaos magic” emerged in the United Kingdom.
The Moores write that “Chaos Magic’s rejection of structure led to its trivialisation, just as credulous escapism rendered New Age philosophy laughable… Despite both misappropirating scientific concepts, quantum or fractal, these approaches proved insufficient to encompass modern life’s rapidly mounting complexity.”
During my occult explorations, I’ve had plenty of firsthand experience for years with both New Age and Chaos Magic practices. I’ve engagaged in their rituals and experimented with them.
And at this point I’m not impressed. I don’t do them anymore because they do not work consistently. The Moores are so right to depict the two traditions here as really two sides of the same coin. They are both fake versions of magic which present psychological tricks as though they are supernatural phenomena.
In each tradition, there are no real doctrines or established histories. People identifying with them can just believe whatever they want and make up anything. And that’s what Blavatsky did with Theosophy. She just threw in a bunch of ideas and bullshit into a blender and then presented something so incoherent that today all Theosophy is really remembered for is its influence on “The Wizard of Oz” and the Nazis. Mitch stands alone today in the foolish endeavor of trying to rehabilitate Blavatsky. But by his own words he doesn’t really take her ideas and actual life history seriously. Instead, he just sees her as an inspiring “persona” which he can invoke on a hip podcast.
The fundamental problem with New Age rituals and Chaos magic “sigils” like what Morrison taught in his talk on that DVD, is that they only seem effective because our minds notice when a spell we’ve done “works” and then we ignore it the vast majority of the time when they do not.
Fundamentalist Christians who believe in “the power of prayer” have the same problem. They notice the few occasions when something they prayed for actually happens and think God must have done them a favor as a result. But they ignore all the times when it did not happen, when God must have been ignoring them.
To conclude with the Reason for the Season, it’s worth asserting clearly at this point:
While Crowley was the most important occultist of the first half of the 20th century, now enough time has passed that we can see Wilson fulfilled that role in the second half.
Wilson taught in Cosmic Trigger and in all of his following books and lectures that the proper way to respond to experiences one has with “entities” is skepticism. Crowley taught the same thing too. This is the opposite of Mitch’s crush Blavatsky who was so confident in her supposed entity contacts that she built an organization around them.
When we have these experiences with spiritual entities, we can’t really know for sure about any of them.
Our rules of science and logic do not apply to entities which transcend the physical world.
I have had so many experiences with entities — more than I can count and most of them frightening. But everything I write about them is always just a speculation and a guess. I can report what I feel and experience, but I can’t assert anything about what caused it with certainty.
That attitude is what we all need not only spiritually, but at the broad cultural level right now:
What a fascinating deep dive. A really cool argument here!