Teratogenic Mystique

a self-selection prompt for October magic course

(NOTE: This is an ad/reminder — not a full article. The accompanying audio post, for paying subscribers, will be a newly released piece of course material: “The 9 Aspects of the Monstrous.” Regular substack articles will resume shortly.)

Hi.

There are a few slots left in the October course — on magic, monsters & madness — for the neo-Occult series of the Parallax Academy. This time I’ll be co-teaching w/ Scout Rainer Wiley from The Oscillator’s Stone and I wanted to make sure substack subscribers also had a chance to check whether they are being called into this odd event. It will be half-course & half-ritual with a strong emphasis on coincidence, acausality and working with half-knowlable aspects of reality. Getting the right (rite?) participants is crucial if we want it to be not just educational but also a participatory co-invocation.

The course is called “The Teratogenic Mystique. It’s an intentionally opaque term. Teratogenesis is the process of becoming monstrous and it is used as a medical term for the beginning of a mutation.

Our contention is that the dark, weird and mutant aspects of magick, occultism & the hermetic arts (viewed through a transrational lens of coherent integrative pluralism) offer certain transformational elements that are commonly missing in the more mainstream new wisdom cultures.

Here are some of the questions we will be addressing:

• Why is the risk of the monstrous, weird & occult necessary to instantiate our participation in the living symbolic landscape?

• Why is it important to prominently incorporate the notion of “dark magic” and “light magic” (which should probably be renamed) into new projects of wisdom cultivation?

• What have the Hermetic lineages and magical fraternities shown us about what does and does not work in terms of establishing a transcultural, science-friendly, intergenerational “religion that is not a religion”?

• How do we approach unknown entities, unintelligible patterns and nonlinear sensemaking as a participatory language needed in order to get beyond the constraints of an exaggerated left-brain, Game A & propositional logic approach to changing ourselves and our world?

• How is our resistance to positive and negative forms of intolerable strangeness are keeping us small and limiting the abilities of our change communities?

• And what do we need in order to activate the terrible, absurd & uncanny as mutant keys to actually transformation ourselves?.

We don’t have limitless space but if you vibe with these inquiries we’ll make sure you can get into the course.

Here’s a meme Bruce Alderman made: