The Ahuman Manifesto by Patricia MacCormack;

Author:Patricia MacCormack;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

A brief history of occulture; Witches, monsters and queerdos

What is occult practice? As a proviso, this chapter deals with only the adoption of Western occult practice (and selectively at that). I will not be addressing any non-European-based magickal practices or traditions because that is not for me to do, and ethical occult practice should avoid fetishistic appropriation at all costs. Contemporary occulture is fetishistic appropriation to an extent, of ancient and seriously adhered-to traditions, but to do this for non-Western practices is not appropriate (keeping in mind many of the traditions I will discuss had a considerable amount of their own appropriation, some of which was encouraged by the indigenous practitioners, but more on this later). Readers of this manifesto of course may be thorough adepts at occult practices or they may think occultism burned with the last European witches, and that Crowley, modern Satanism and witchcraft belong to the realm of carnival hacks, cult gurus and marketing trends. Both are the case. I am not seeking to validate occulture for contemporary times, but I am in the fortunate position of finding myself in a crossroad (of course, the most highly charged of magickal places where criminals and witches hang) of European magickal traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, feminist practices of subversion, queer experiments in performative practices which put the body on the line, and the rise of so-called extreme anti-religion in places like Scandinavia, while on the other side of the Bosporus my queer Turkish academic colleagues are being expelled and exiled and entire populations are being actually demonized by their own countries and fundamentalist religious stricture. Meanwhile, arguably the most fundamentalist religious country in the world, the United States, the same one which also claims to be the most free, has a messianic leader whose Money God seems on his side. All the while the rise of the right is occurring in ways we have not witnessed since the 1930s. Extreme times call for extreme imagination, which can be understood as hope, as compassion, as extreme alterity, all of which directly challenge the extreme right as a repetition of a phantasmatic lost pattern, which is an excuse for imposing violence and power. If the United States and other religious fundamentalist countries of any religion see themselves as God’s people, all I can say is bring on the Antichrist and End of Days. To the Cathars and Manichaeans, all material reality was satanic, so movements such as material feminism and real-life politics are deemed satanic already. Material reality, acknowledgement of the physical affects of violence and power, celebration of the actual liberty of bodies seem to be distasteful to the abstraction of lives, bodies and singularities of relations of difference that fundamental religion, right-wing politics and media, and capitalism enforces. Valuing all material incarnations of life, especially all as collectives of difference, refuses to reduce organisms to units of use or statistics in comparison to the abstract transcendental God of currency/semiocapitalism. Fear of End of Days by religion has a long narrative tendency to follow the rise of minoritarians in claiming their rights.

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