Psychedelic Zionism Explained: 10 Provocations

Or why you should probably just unsubscribe now.

Greetings from Yucca Valley!

We've received bursts of new subscribers to our humble Substack over the last few months thanks to several much-appreciated recommendations and the reprinting of one of my articles at

Future of Jewish

, which has 70,000 subscribers, making it the largest of any Jewish publication on Substack.

And I had my first Note go “viral” last month too, so probably some of you out there have foolishly wandered in as a result of this moment’s annoyed provocation:

Welcome. However, my reaction to the email alerts of each new sign up remains the same as it has been since we launched in Summer 2022: "I wonder how long it will take before this person realizes the huge mistake they've made."

Here at God of the Desert Books we are a book publisher releasing titles across genres and styles, from memoirs to poetry collections to science fiction adventures, thrillers, and supernatural mysteries. We are an activist publisher, with a militant Zionist ethos in bold defense of the Jewish state and the Jewish people from the 46% of the global population who hates them. And in the coming years we hope to grow to an international scope, adding more Israeli and Middle East authors to join the first author we've published,

P. David Hornik

in Israel, as well as people of diverse cultures, faiths, and ideologies around the United States and the entire world.

I hope that you'll join us in this journey as we continue to move forward with one book after another, with the five Substacks we've already launched and the more to come in the future. Please check out our

Heroes of the Desert Books

,

Ghosts of the Desert Books

,

Goddess of the Desert Books

, and

Oasis of the Desert Books

Substacks, each representing one of our imprints.

However, I very much understand if you would prefer not to, and in this post I will make the case why you should not: why you would probably feel better to just unsubscribe now.

The underlying ethos of this publishing company is a philosophy, ideology, mission which I've chosen to call Psychedelic Zionism. This seeks to combine the insights of a counterculture/mystical orientation with a hawkish Zionism infused by Jewish wisdom.

I've laid out many of these ideas in posts over the last two and a half years, notably some of these:

PIIZAPS: The 7 Primary Publishing Principles for God of the Desert Books

The 40 Counterculture Writers Who Most Shaped Psychedelic Zionism, Part I

The 40 Counterculture Writers Who Most Shaped Psychedelic Zionism, Part II

Mainstream Political Positions Argued in Extreme Ways: A Manifesto of Sorts

7 Great Counterculture Authors Who Inspire My Writing and Zionist Activism

The Absurd Way I Accidentally Cured My PTSD

However, it's probably best to summarize in brief what some of these concepts are, so if anything is too wild or scary for you, you can just get off the bus now:

1. We Are Post-Partisan and Post-Ideological

At GOTD, we do not come from any Democratic/Republican or Left/Right bias. We have voted for both parties, aligned with both sides of the spectrum, and now reject both as well as the oversimplified binary thinking that goes along with it. Not everyone who contributes here and whose books we publish agrees with me here—some are to the left and others to the right—thus you can expect to sometimes get articles from either side. Here we want to encourage healthy dialogue from across the aisle between reasonable liberals and conservatives. Unreasonable people on both the hard left and hard right can find their echo chambers elsewhere.

2. Politics is downstream from culture and technology

Part of this rejection of conventional politics comes from an understanding that there are factors in this world more important than political contests, that influence politics more deeply: new technological innovations allow for new forms of cultural expression which in turn shape the political movements and public policy efforts. Thus, culture and technological innovative (particularly AI right now) are of higher priority here than arguing over what's happening in Washington D.C.

3. The God of Israel Exists and the Jewish People Are His Light Unto the Nations In this Dark, Fallen World

My fiancée,

Sally Shideler

, GOTD's Editor-In-Chief and my partner in this publishing company, and I are not Jewish. We are a witch and wizard out in the desert talking to spirits and casting magick spells. And we're not planning on converting any time soon, even though, well, the God of Israel does actually exist.

I have continued to endure one challenge and setback after another with launching this publishing company not because of a desire to make a whole lot of money (wrong business to try and do that!) but because I have engaged in mystical rituals in which the God of Israel revealed himself to me and commanded me to serve as His prophet, working to heal the divides between His people, between the warring factions of Jews, Muslims, and Christians. My apologies if this sounds weird: By all means, go ahead and unsubscribe if this unusual orientation strikes you as madness, because it's only going to get worse from here.

4. Ghosts and Demons Walk the Earth, Hungry and Desperate and Alone

Just as Sally and I have encountered the God of Israel and his angels directly, so too have we long dealt with his opponents: dark, malevolent spirits on the earth that may be characterized as demons as well as lost souls commonly understood as ghosts, who just need some encouragement to go to heaven where they can choose to stay or be reincarnated into a life of their own choosing.

My primary explanation for so much suffering, chaos, and violence in the world may grow a little tiresome and repetitive: I maintain that most people are possessed by demons to one degree or another. Crimes, cruelty, illnesses, natural disasters like what we've seen in LA—who is to blame for this? Demonic, supernatural spirits. Over the last 9 years I wrote an adaptation in novel-form of the apocryphal Book of Enoch. It's done now, it's in Sally's editing queue, and it will be perhaps the third or fourth title we aim to release under our Oasis of the Desert literary line of books. At some point as I was rewriting this more than 2000-year-old book, I came to believe it, not in an entirely literal sense, but certainly close enough.

So if this understanding of the source of evil in the world strikes you as too ridiculous to consider, by all means, please unsubscribe.

5. Wave Your Wand: Magick and the Supernatural Exist

Accompanying this understanding of demonic spirits as the foundation of evil in the world comes the effort to fight back and control the chaos around us. And I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but supernatural problems tend to require supernatural solutions. This equates to the casting of spells of various sorts on an almost daily basis. So-called "ceremonial magic" does actually work. Invoking spirits does work—my favorite at the moment is the Egyptian deity Thoth, who hangs out in the Hod sphere, the orange orb down there on the Tree of Life near the bottom:

Tarot cards do actually work to reveal the future. Past lives do exist and there are ways to figure out who you previously were, if you aren't a young soul who is going on this ride for the first time. (Sally and I are both old souls. We've been reincarnating since at least the time of Abram and Sarai, who were in fact real people, even if the Bible gives a drastically oversimplified version of what we—I mean they—did circa 2000 BCE.)

We're not going to try and prove any of this strange, supernatural, occult, New Age "woo-woo" to anyone. Being beyond nature and natural laws means that science can't really prove any of this stuff, at least not yet. We can point you in the right directions to figure out some of this stuff, but you're really on your own to do so. Try the various rituals, experiment with one system or another, and see for yourself why all this magical stuff has endured for so long, even though people wanted to burn us at the stake for engaging with it.

6. Just Say Yes: In Favor of Widespread and Responsible Drug Use

And now for the psychedelic part. As should be no surprise for a couple of New Age-y woo-woos out near Joshua Tree National Park, we advocate for the responsible use of marijuana and conventional psychedelics such as psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, and—my favorite right now, since it's legal and easily available—amanita muscaria.

You want "proof" of all this supernatural strangeness that I'm talking about? Take a large dose of mushrooms and the spirits can certainly show up. And you'll realize then that these aren't hallucinations of things that aren't there. These are independent intelligences that the change in brain chemistry simply facilitates. See Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception. What these drugs seem to do is shut off parts of the brain which have evolved to prevent us from seeing and interacting directly with the various spirits that exist beyond the natural world, the way our brain usually edits out our glasses frames from our perception, even though they’re certainly and constantly present.

Again, I'm not going to try and prove this to you. If someone has never set foot in the ocean, never tasted a hot fudge sundae, you can only describe in words what one must really experience to understand.

And of course, these substances are not only useful for spiritual healing, but for physical healing also. And Shamans have known this since before human history began.

Again, go ahead and unsubscribe if this is beyond the pale for you.

7. We Are Pro-War and Revolutionary

Now to return to the Zionist side of the equation for a moment. In spite of this hippie-dippie mentality, the "make love, not war component" of 1960s counterculture is something we've set aside.

Over the last 15 years I've advocated much the opposite. Currently the "Axis of Genocide"—Russia, Iran, and China, as well as their junior partners in North Korea, Turkey, and in terrorist groups like Hamas, the Houthis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Hezbollah—is waging war on free societies and oppressing the people trapped within their territories. As much as this publishing company advocates for peace in the middle east, as Ecclesiastes saith, there is also a time for war, and that time is now. These states need to be free. They need revolutions to bring them into line with the rest of the free world, to protect the human rights of their people and to give them a voice in how their countries operate.

As such, I will continue to advocate for a hawkish approach to foreign policy, comparable to that of John Bolton, who was my choice for GOP nominee back in 2015 and remains so today. I know he is hated by a whole lot of people on both the left and the right, so if you cannot stand someone who has embraced a hawkish ideology comparable to his for the last 15 years, then by all means, unsusbcribe now.

8. Pessimistic Realism: Prepare for the Darkness Descending on the World

Coupled alongside this understanding of a world threatened by authoritarian regimes waging war on freedom and demonic spirits fueling their imperial slave state ambitions, comes a rather pessimistic view of how things are going to go both domestically and globally in the coming decades. In my analysis, American culture is in a state of degrading now. As I wrote about here, the polls for the young people's moral values are atrocious. Did you know that 20% of Gen-Zers don't think the Holocaust happened and 30% are unsure? Or how about their adoration for alleged CEO murderer Luigi Mangione?

As pro-technology as I am and as excited about AI, the unintended consequences of these technologies have been tremendous. So much hate has been spread because of the internet, so much harm has been caused, and the cultures of America degrading is the result. This trend is unlikely to be reversed. American tribalism is going to get worse. Back in the 1990s, George Carlin talked about how "the public sucks," giving that truth as the reason why so many politicians suck. That trend is just going to keep continuing—greater stupidity, greater malevolence, prepare yourselves. This Prophet of the God of Israel is a prophet of Doom.

So if you don't want to hear about the horrors of the world and warnings to gird up your loins and prepare for war, then by all means, I understand: Please unsubscribe.

See Colin Woodard’s great book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, the source of this excellent map.

9. A Counterculture Response to a Country of Toxic Cultures

As may be unsurprising given this strange, fringe summary of the ethos behind this publishing company, I tend not to like the more dominant "mainstream cultures" of America. I wrote about "Why I hate Indiana So Much" back in 2022, and it remains the most controversial and offensive essay that I've ever published. I explained how "Midwest culture" is toxic to me, that blending of "Midlands" and "Greater Appalachia" culture. But the reality is that it's not just Midwest culture which I don't care for that much. It's most big, dominant cultures not just in America, but in the world at large. The bigger any group of people becomes, the more oppressive it becomes, the more intolerant of those who do not fit into the broader collective. I prefer smaller cultural groups that haven't amassed such large amounts of power to oppress people: countries and areas where there are many smaller groups which have to collaborate, blend together, and work in peace.

That’s why I like living in this spot out here in the desert so much. We are right at the border between The Far West and broader Mexico, with California "Left Coast" culture as an influence, but not dominating. (Yes, I too understand why so many "California liberals" are regarded as so annoying. Being adjacent to that cultural tendency, I know its shortcomings and excesses, too.)

I remain an advocate of "counterculture," not just the 1960s sort, but the tendency universally, to not seek to change a culture that is corrupt and beyond changing, but to set oneself apart, to stand as the Jews do, as a light unto the nations, to not try to change others, but to give them an example for how they might change, themselves, if they are so inclined.

10. The Mystery of the Talking Dog

So let's wrap this up on a more upbeat, funny note with one last absurdity many people might prefer to avoid.

Our dog, Jasmine, can talk. I usually can't hear her, but Sally can, loud and clear, and will regularly tell me what she's saying. We've done some articles in this vein, where Jasmine dictates what she wants to say, what she thinks of things, her answers to our questions. Most people will look at these and simply regard them as fiction. But they're not. Jasmine really is saying this stuff. Apparently all dogs can talk! Most people just can't hear it. But the dogs do talk to each other also, both verbally in conversations and by sending smells to one another like emails.

Again, if this is just too weird or crazy for you, then by all means, feel free to unsubscribe now, better now than later.

OK, that should hit all the bases of weirdness and offensive provocations. If anyone has any questions then you know where the comments section is or feel free to hit us up on Notes and email.

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