The Third Occult Revival

Ever since Theodosius’s reign of terror in the 4th Century CE, Western spirituality has been an occult matter. With the coming of Abrahamic tyranny, anyone with an interest in the true nature of the divine was driven underground lest they be murdered. Between the murders of Hypatia in 415 CE and of Giordano Bruno in 1600, Westerners were subjected to the most psychopathic campaign of spiritual destruction in human history, with millions slaughtered for refusing to bow to an idol of the dead rabbi.

Occultism was the inevitable end result of these centuries of terror. Anyone interested in genuine spirituality, such as raising one’s frequency of consciousness above suffering, was forced to pursue that interest in secret. Those interested in science were forced into secrecy also. Thus occultism, genuine spirituality and true science came to overlap to a major degree (for an excellent history of the influence of this occultism on the history of science, see The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett).

Christianity started to die around the time of the murder of Bruno, perhaps because the centuries of atrocities had finally made the reputation of the religion unsalvagable. Since then, the knowledge pushed into the occult has undergone several waves of mass public interest. We are now in the third of such waves of occult revival.

The first wave came at the end of the 19th Century. Writing in 1883, Nietzsche was able to say “God is dead” in Thus Spake Zarathustra because his society had already abandoned Yahweh (he would have been murdered if he had written The Anti-Christ a few centuries earlier). Society at the time, desperate for meaning, was ready for a return to esoteric truths.

The Theosophical Society was founded in New York City in 1875, and The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in the 1880s in England. Spiritualism, as a religious movement, also peaked around this time. All of these movements took an interest in subjects that were banned during the years of Christian tyranny. This first occult revival brought spiritual concepts and awareness back to popular consciousness for the first time in centuries.

This first revival was ended by the First World War. The need to overcome physical enemies forced the West into a drive for more shells, more bullets, more troops, a relentless focus on quantity to the exclusion of quality, and thereby forced it screaming back into materialism.

The second occult revival followed from the discovery of the psychoactive properties of LSD in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, and the rediscovery of sacramental magic mushroom use by New York investment banker R Gordon Wasson in the 1950s. Although this wave of psychedelic use did not last long, thanks to the War on Drugs, it had a powerful impact on popular consciousness. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception brought the idea of tripping to a wide audience, and the Summer of 1969 made it a reality.

This second occult revival encompassed the New Age movement that began in the 1970s. This movement was aware that we were living in a spiritual dark age, and that most genuine spirituality had been suppressed over the centuries. The War on Drugs prevented people from rediscovering this spirituality, and neoliberalism brought them back to profit and loss, quantity and production, and thereby back to materialism.

The mini-Dark Age caused by neoliberalism did not last. In the 2020s, we are going through a third occult revival. This third revival seems to be inspired by a combination of the Internet and the end of what Emmanuel Macron called the end of the era of abundance.

The Internet has made it easier than ever to share esoteric knowledge. Growing up in the Satanic Panic era of the 80s and early 90s, it was hard to even find an accurate and objective book about occultism. When covered in the media, it was mostly scare stories about murders, rapes and insanity. Thanks to the Internet, sane (or relatively sane) people have been able to contact each other and discuss occult subjects, bringing awareness of such subjects to new levels.

In terms of raw knowledge, people are much more advanced than they would have been at any time since the death of Yahweh. Every student of occultism has an esoteric lodge in their own home thanks to the Internet. Thanks to this technological advance, curious people everywhere are now deep into occult studies.

The end of the era of abundance is also driving people away from materialism. Materialism used to mean big houses, flash cars, rich food, abundant entertainment, easy travel and access to all kinds of gadgets. Today materialism means being trapped at work, paying rent, eating slop, watching brainrot: dying, like a battery drained of energy.

People are getting a much worse deal from materialism now than during the 20th Century. This is causing them to look for happiness in the metaphysical. Some of them shop around mainstream religious denominations, only to find that most of the adherents don’t even believe in God or in anything spiritual. The massive disappointment of both nihilistic atheistic materialism and of mainstream religion (a conundrum described as the Clown World Fork) is turning people back towards occultism.

As part of this third occult revival, we already see groups of those interested in genuine spirituality arising, and growing. These groups are forming outside of the purview of government or mainstream religious authorities, an actual folk movement. But, despite the lack of official oversight, they are thriving. God is more fundamental than the government, and people acting with God’s approval are more powerful than those acting with governmental approval.

This third wave might include both spiritualism and psychedelics, so that the first and second waves are both represented, combined into a new movement where all hidden qualities of the mind and consciousness are open to discovery and investigation. Perhaps modern advances in psychological science could contribute to this.

It’s impossible to say how long this third revival might last, or how far it might go. Eventually an occult revival will lead to a new spiritual order in Western Civilisation, but it’s too early to know if this one is it.

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How We Will Lose Our Free Speech Rights

Because we’ve had peace and prosperity for so long now, it’s a common belief that both states are natural and no special effort is required to maintain either. This is a grievous delusion. It’s possible that, as per Phaedrus, the natural state of consciousness is incarnated in a higher dimension where there is no suffering. But down here on Earth, the natural state of life is brutish, nasty and short.

The tribal and violent nature of pre-civilisational life has been ameliorated, post-civilisation, chiefly through the invention of marriage, which has allowed supertribal consciousness to manifest through homogenising existing tribes in their shared offspring. The more tribes that married into each other, the more this higher consciousness was brought into being. Eventually clans formed, and then city-states.

These city-states had plenty of what Aristotle called philia. This was a kind of neighbourly solidarity that served as the mortar holding the edifice of society together. This philia created a sense that people were on the same team, moving in the same direction, and this goodwill allowed them to agree on things, e.g. that free speech would be important.

For most of human history, there has been a widespread understanding that the standard of living afforded by this homogeneity was a good thing, and so that homogeneity ought to be defended. So when new blood was introduced from the outside, it was married in to the existing stock so as to avoid factionalisation. Aristotle wrote, in Politics, that “heterogeneity of stocks may lead to faction – at any rate until they have had time to assimilate.”

This factionalisation is what destroys freedoms, as freedoms only exist when everyone can agree on their importance. Absent this agreement, any and all freedoms can and do become banned on the grounds they are destabilising, corruptive or degenerate influences. The sad truth about the human animal is that we are panicky, skittish beings prone to contagions of fear and hysteria. Hence we like to ban things, especially if we don’t understand them. If there isn’t general agreement that a particular freedom is important, it tends to get banned.

The freest country in the world, America, is the way it is because of general agreement on the importance of free speech, free assembly, free trade and various other freedoms. Children are taught at the earliest school that freedom is a foundational American virtue, and that only America’s enemies oppose freedom.

Unfortunately, this mentality is not universal.

New Zealand had a referendum on freedom with the cannabis referendum in 2020. NZ-born voters voted Yes, for freedom. Those born outside of New Zealand voted No. Their cultures don’t have freedom, they don’t understand it. So they voted ours away.

Kiwis responded with a shrug, and just got on with life. Another freedom gone, who cares?

We will lose our free speech rights the same way.

The image at the top of this article is a screenshot of a recent press release from a coalition of religious groups in New Zealand: the highest authorities for each of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs in this country. They have combined forces to agitate for further free speech crackdowns. This is in response to some of the statements made by Brian Tamaki (see 2:00 in this video for examples), in particular claims that Modi was purging India of Christians and that New Zealand ought to retaliate in kind, burning down mosques and temples and purging New Zealand of Hindus, Sihks and Muslims.

Tamaki has said several heinous things, and could rightly be charged with being a nuisance to public order. But if hate speech laws are introduced, they will soon become blasphemy laws. It’s no secret that some religions, particularly the Abrahamisms, would like to make criticising them illegal. Adherents of these religions will tirelessly push to widen any hate speech law that gets passed.

The main long-term danger is that, as New Zealand becomes less Kiwi through mass immigration, the population becomes less interested in freedom.

Free speech became a core Western value in the 1950s, as neither the Nazi opponents in World War II nor the Commie opponents in the Cold War believed in it. We were told that free speech was why our societies were better: it allowed them to self-correct, thereby avoiding the extremes of the totalitarian systems.

This worked out excellently for some decades, up until the end of the 20th Century. After then, there was mass immigration from countries with no traditions of free speech. Consequently, popular support for free speech started to waver. Having little of value to say, the immigrants could not see the value in free speech. So support for free speech is now declining. It will continue to decline as the West continues to muttify.

There might not be a referendum in New Zealand about free speech per se, but about a free speech-related issue. It might be about a proposed hate speech law. In any case, the Chinese, Muslim and Pacific Islander voters who voted away our cannabis freedom will (in all likelihood) vote away our free speech rights as well. They can’t be expected to vote for freedom because it’s not valued in their cultures.

If New Zealanders lose our free speech rights, it will be through the mass immigration of people who don’t value them.

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Low-IQ Morality Vs. High-IQ Morality

All of the debates around morality can be summarised by reference to one of two schools of thought. There is a low-IQ morality, and a high-IQ morality.

Low-IQ morality is binary. It is “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”. No thought is required to follow it – children and slaves could both easily understand. The essence of low-IQ morality is simplicity. The fear is that, if morality was too complicated, it would just be ignored.

Those following low-IQ morality speak as if life was a battle between their morality and evil. Everything outside of themselves and their mindset is evil. They even consider high-IQ morality evil, on the grounds that the nuance of high-IQ morality fails to provide a sufficiently firm defence against the dark forces of the world.

High-IQ morality is ternary, with an extra dimension compared to binary morality. High-IQ morality is “deficiency”, “mean” and “excess”. This is the morality of Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius: the Doctrine of the Mean or the Middle Way. It is moral philosophy for adults.

Those following high-IQ morality understand that life is more subtle than low-IQ people can appreciate, and that black-and-white thinking is usually low-resolution and inaccurate. Worse, the us-and-them mentality inherent to binary morality leads to vendettas, bloodfeuds and all-out wars as people hunker down against the out-group.

Despite this, high-IQ morality doesn’t see low-IQ morality as necessarily evil. Socrates, for example, argued that human misdeeds were the result of ignorance rather than evil. The low-IQ are considered more in need of guidance than punishment.

The most common low-IQ moralities in the world are the Abrahamic religions. These are the archetype of “thou shalt” mentality. They threaten eternal hellfire and brimstone, in contrast to the subtle punishments of the high-IQ moralities, which warn of less happiness. There are billions of followers of Abrahamic religions, mostly in low-IQ scumholes.

Wokism is also a form of low-IQ morality, in that it has an endless list of things that people aren’t allowed to do or say (or even think). The exaggerated sense of caution that people are forced to adopt today is common to both the wokist regime and the Soviet Union. One must live in constant fear of moral judgment, for the slightest error might see one, like Solzhenitsyn, sent to the gulag (the wokist equivalent being cancellation).

Atheist materialism is also a binary morality, because it amounts to following the herd. The morality can be summed up as “The herd is natural, and therefore the herd is good”. Atheists consider themselves to have transcended low-IQ morality, but in reality they have just exchanged one form of it for another: the “thou shalt” comes from groupthink instead of a priest.

High-IQ moralities are rare in the West. Very few people have read the Nicomachean Ethics, much less applied it. Many high-IQ people are aware that Buddha promoted a philosophy called the Middle Way, but not many have tried meditating every day for a month. Those who do apply a high-IQ morality to their lives, however, are the world’s true master race.

The West generally acts as if “more is always better”, which is, in fact, a low-IQ morality. It’s presented to us as masculine and assertive, but is really the mentality of a baby grasping for the tit. A high-IQ morality would resist mindless consumption while still saying Yes to life. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to see the rise of a movement that can achieve this before the system collapses.

Many people stumble upon something like the doctrine of the mean, but make little use of it. After all, children often learn with their first bee sting that too much bravery is as bad as too little. But high-IQ morality will never become popular, because the masses are low IQ. Perhaps 5% of the population can fully apply high-IQ morality under normal circumstances. This may have been as high as 25% in Aristotle’s time and might be as low as 1% in today’s Clown World.

Binary morality is better for low-IQ people because it’s simpler to apply. The difficulty with ternary morality is that it requires a lot of thought to know where the right middle ground is (as Aristotle wrote in Nicomachean Ethics, the correct middle ground is sometimes closer to one extreme than to the other). Trying to teach ternary morality to low-IQ people would just confuse them.

Perhaps the best approach is to teach binary morality to children, and then teach ternary morality once the children hit about 15 years of age. If a person isn’t smart enough to understand ternary morality, they can be taught a binary form until the end of their schooling. The difficulty is that existing low-IQ moralities (e.g. Christianity) are no longer persuasive, so a new one will have to be invented.

People ought to adopt a high-IQ morality if they can, but there are so many low-IQ people that humanity has to make do.

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The Alt Centrist Approach To Religion

In the West, religion and Christianity are closely intertwined. The Establishment Right, for instance, are heavily Christian. Much of the recent history of politics in the West is defined by the need to deal with the power of Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular. To a major extent, the freedom desired by the Second Acceptance is freedom from religious dogma and strictures.

The Establishment Right’s obsession with order, at the expense of everything else, is the ultimate cause of hundreds of millions of deaths from religious terrorism throughout history. The belief that there is only one way to God, and that everyone rejecting that path is evil and God wants them destroyed, is psychopathic. There is no difference between Muslim jihadists, Christians demanding that “every knee shall bow” and Jews trying to subjugate humanity through tikkun olam. All are monsters.

If anything exemplified the excessive order of the First Rejection it is Abrahamism with its absolute refusal to tolerate other religions.

The Western World has not known a destroyer of freedom like Abrahamism. In the ancient European world, all manner of different cults to different gods existed. When the Christians came, they destroyed everything spiritual they could. The Eleusinian Mysteries, which Cicero called the greatest of all of Athens’s gifts to civilisation, were broken up by Christian fanatics over 1,600 years ago.

Atheism, however, is no solution.

Absent purpose, materialism has given us today’s mental health epidemic. The mainstream materialist narrative suggests that happiness comes from consumption. Television advertising shows us happy people buying alcohol, buying travel, buying fashion, buying, buying, buying.

The problem, as Buddha taught long ago, is that desire leads to misery. All the television advertising just implants desire that wouldn’t otherwise exist, thereby creating misery that wouldn’t otherwise exist. Mindless consumption, removed from existential meaning, doesn’t lead to anything close to happiness.

The truth is that people need religion. Materialists deny this, claiming that as long as people have food, shelter and work they will be satisfied. In reality, people have souls and those souls need purpose. Religion provides that. So people need religion to be happy.

For a religion to make someone happy, however, it needs to be true. The drawback of false religions, like the Abrahamic cults, is that people can intuitively sense they’re not true. People can tell, in their hearts, that it doesn’t matter if some rabbi claimed to have died for their sins or not. They can sense that God will judge them for their own karmic debt, not for what someone else may have done. Only the hopelessly degenerate are committed to a belief in no God. So people will always find their way back to religion in some form.

This yearning for religion can be seen everywhere in youth culture. The wokists and SJWs are really just another form of Abrahamist, as has been described at length elsewhere. These people are desperate for the order that true religion provides, and the reason why so many of them are going insane is because they’re not getting it from Marxism. It’s remarkable how similar woke culture, with its hundreds of unwritten rules about what opinions are permissible, is to the Abrahamic cults, which are also totalitarianisms.

A powerful desire for spiritual order can also be seen on the right, most obviously in the TradCath fad. It manifests in a variety of subtler forms also, such as Esoteric Hitlerism, which is everywhere on the non-mainstream Internet. The rising neopagan movement is a kind of European ghar wapsi, as white people seek to rediscover the beliefs and practices of their pre-Christian ancestors.

In the centre are practices such as Elementalism, which takes traditional spiritual practices like psychedelic sacrament use – something both left and right are generally indifferent towards – and blends it with a hierarchical priesthood and an admonition to overcome bestial impulses.

If the entire left-right spectrum exhibits religious or pseudo-religious behaviour, we can conclude that the religious impulse is universal, even if suppressed in some. Thus we can see that the order provided by religion is necessary. The Roman Empire was famous for its piety; heroic figures like Aeneas made a point of pious behaviour. The writings of the Greek Golden Age were replete with references to the gods. So it seems that civilisations wax and wane in correspondence with the strength of their religious belief.

Religion is therefore too precious to be left up to cowboys and clowns, as is the case in today’s West. The obvious solution is for the state to run its own religion, but for there to also be religious freedom, as per ancient Greece and Rome.

This means the state needs to promote a national religion. The precise form of these religions will vary from place to place. In New Zealand, for instance, there would be cults of Woden, Maui and Zealandia, reflecting British heritage, Maori heritage and the modern synthesis, respectively. Northern Europe could adopt elements of the Norse pantheon; Southern Europe could adopt elements of the Greco-Roman pantheon.

This solution has one major drawback: if you allow religious freedom for certain religions, as the Romans discovered, they will use that freedom to destroy the others.

The Theodosian Code records that, as soon as Christians took power in Rome, they worked to annihilate the European religions. Followers of these traditions were increasingly ostracised until the religions themselves were made illegal. Islam, also, has been responsible for the destruction of Buddhist and Hindu communities in countless places. The Mughal invasion of India is probably the single most murderous action in history (if measured by total body count). Neither have the Jews been much better. These three Abrahamic religions are characterised by their unceasing struggle for political power and control at the expense of truth, justice, freedom, peace and basic human decency.

The optimal solution, then, is a state religion plus freedom for all non-political religions. For maximum acceptance, this freedom ought to be extended as broadly as possible; only the Abrahamic religions are truly political enough to be worth of proscription. This could be taken even further, with a declaration that true justice would be the active destruction of the political religions, using all the powers of the state.

This chapter is from The Alternative Centrist Manifesto, the upcoming masterwork of political philosophy that offers the answers to the political problems of the West.

For more of VJM’s ideas, see his work on other platforms!
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