Against Everyone with Conner Habib

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 326: FELIX JOHN TAYLOR on THE LIGHT OF THE HERMETIC ORDER OF THE GOLDEN DAWN
The first time I heard about the Golden Dawn, I was in high school. I was gay, Syrian, reading all the time, shunning sports. My town was filled with neo-Nzis and fundamentalists, celebrated stupidity and football players.
I wanted to feel something like power in a disempowering place, so I went to Brentano’s and found the most startling magic book there. On its cover was a person drawing a pentagram of crackling blue light with a wand. In it, instructions on making magical tools and spellcasting. And in its title, the word magick was written with a K. In contrast to the hell of school, the book represented an academy of magic. I found there allusions to The Golden Dawn, a group from almost a century prior, with secrets of not just power, but antiquity and the cosmos.
But they also seemed rigid, too elaborate and hierarchical. Plus I didn't like their most infamous member, Aleister Crowley, so I turned away from them. As I deepened my interests in occultism into adulthood, my pursuit of esoteric christianity, particularly the work of Rudolf Steiner, I steered clear.
I've become more sympathetic over time to the Golden Dawn. That doesn't mean I'm going to wade into their rituals, but that a real re-assessment has occurred. So this episodes’s guest, librarian and scholar FELIX JOHN TAYLOR ’s beautiful book, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: Magic Arts and the Occult Revival was a great find for me. In it, he gives a portrait of the Golden Dawn through its key members and its art. A picture emerges of not just a magickal group, but an art and social movement, working to redefine morality for the sake of inclusiveness and creativity. After all, Crowley fell in love with a drag queen at a gay bar in 1897. Oscar Wilde and Edward Carpenter influenced the group. So did Steiner, for that matter! W.B. Yeats brought his Golden Dawn work to revitalize Irish identity.
I’m so happy you’ll be joining me and Felix John Taylor in this reappraisal.
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Friends, I've been doing this podcast for over eight years and one thing I've noticed since the beginning: guests always want to talk about spirituality. I know, I know, it's self-selecting. I'M the one who wants to talk about it. Sure, that's true. But also, everyone is EXCITED to discuss it when I bring it up. It's like it's on the tip of everyone's tongues and has been for a decade. Now, it's starting to be fully pronounced, like a spell shouted into the air.
I’m sure you’ve seen it too: whether it’s the convergence of witchcraft and feminism, the popularization of political wellness which has ritual components, the appearance of crystals in the Los Angeles mayoral race, the conspiratorial intimations about black magick during lockdowns... People have been trying to interpret the world through a spiritual lens that religion doesn't seem up to - but the political realm has so overwhelmed people’s perceptions that instead of being TRANSFORMED by spiritual encounter, they're merely grafting it onto already-established, politicized worldviews.
This includes political pundits and secularized media ridiculing spiritual perspectives as a distraction from their failure to scrutinize 60 hour work weeks, economic bamboozling, or outdated attitudes about gender.
I've done my best to mediate this, because I could see it all coming (not bragging, promise, you can hear me discuss it on early episodes!). I’ve tried to occupy a sort of cultural position that was largely held in the past by de-witchers, fairy doctors, alchemical scientists and more, people who separated what's true and false when it came to spiritual paths, critiques, and pursuits. They constituted a whole classes of laborers people largely disappeared by the materialist, academic, and professional world.
But we can’t wait any longer, we need experts in this field. An expert I trust and appreciate so deeply on these matters is Thomas Waters, lecturer in history at Imperial College London (and AEWCH 98 guest)
So we talk together about magick’s role today, and the new magickal realm we find ourselves in.
I’m so excited to share this episode with you.
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buy Magick: Decoding the Visual Culture of Spells, Illusions and Psychic Powers by Thomas Waters from an indie bookshop
buy Cursed BritainA History of Witchcraft and Black Magic in Modern Times by Thomas Waters from an indie bookshop

I talk with intellectual historian, A.J.A. WOODS , author of the excellent and very readable The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West on to the show to discuss all this.
In their book, A.J.A. traces the great movement of blaming everything good and bad - from trans liberation to sexual abuse, from religious plurality to totalizing Satanism, from fighting state violence to supporting gulags - on something called cultural Marxism.
If it sounds incoherent, that’s because coherence is not really the point. The illusion of coherence is. And the illusion is created by noise and density.
I have my own shaky relationship to the Frankfurt School, and I'm so happy to share this exploration with you in hopes that it will inspire you to rethink and/or revisit these philosophers.

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Friends, “The hour is late. It is time for unwanted guests to leave.”
That's a line from this episode's guest, MITCH HOROWITZ, in his latest book, Esoterika: Formulas Against the False Self.
The book as I see it, is a book of ethics. And its central question is: how do you navigate who you are and what your ethics are when you touch the continuously transformative fires of spiritual pursuits?
In that sense, it is a book for anyone exploring their spirituality.
In it, Mitch traces his own inner (and outer) conflicts with spiritual maxims. Particular to Mitch is the conundrum of: How do I get what I want, yet retain my integrity? What do I do when there's a conflict? And where does magic come in?
This is a great discussion and one where we navigate our own tensions of belief and disbelief; will and surrender.
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On this episode of Against Everyone with Conner Habib, I talk with esoteric author and scholar MARK BOOTH (AKA Jonathan Black), whose excellent new book, THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE: HOW ANCIENT WISDOM MADE THE WORLD, traces the occult influences found in modern science, especially the science of physics.
Mark’s book is not just an outline of confluences.
In other words, it’s not one of many books already available which seem to validate spiritual wisdom with modern science. Instead, it is something more singular and more needed for our time. It shows how esoteric ideas and thinkers, seers and magicians, intersected with scientists as they developed the theories that live in our own scientific worldviews.
Mark is also the author of one of the best introductions to real esoteric perspectives, The Secret History of the World , as well as The Sacred History: How Angels, Mystics and Higher Intelligence Made Our World and the ebook, The Secret History of Dante: Unearthing the Real-Life Mysteries of the Inferno.
Mark has been a dream guest for me since I started this show over eight years ago. Although we spoke a few times in the intervening years, I'm so excited that we finally got to talk in this capacity, for the podcast.
But we weren't alone! In a perfect example of spiritual entanglement, when Mark brought up the physicist Wolfgang Pauli - famed for the so-called Pauli effect or shorting out technology wherever he went - our recoding crashed completely, and we had to restart the call. 
Luckily, it's still all intact for you!