Operation Mindfuck: Are the Discordians To Blame For It All?
Last November at Occulture Berlin I gave a talk, the video of it is here . The sound is a bit quiet and there are no pictures after a bit, so here is the text. Hail Eris! All Hail Discordia! Some of you will have come across that call and response. What's it about? Where and when did all that stuff start? What has it got to do with magic, or the present state of the world? And what has it got to do with our intimations of immortality? These questions are what this talk is about. Imagine, for a moment, it's around 1960, and some artists who are perhaps beginning to realise themselves as magicians start a prank. The prank results in millions of people waking up to the malleable nature of consensus reality, how it is shaped by desire and news and illusions. These people start using this insight to feed into their own practices, of magic and other things that aren't called magic but have a lot in common. These people grow a subculture of magic that you can get behind ...