Summary
➡ The text discusses the complex ideas of esotericism, the study of hidden or secret knowledge, and its influence on literature and culture. It mentions the works of authors like Burroughs and Crowley, who used writing as a tool to explore and manipulate reality. The text also delves into the concept of language as a constraining and potentially alien entity, suggesting that it can limit our thinking and perception of reality. Lastly, it touches on the idea of ‘gnosis’ or secret knowledge, and how it might affect our existence.
➡ The text talks about Burroughs, a writer who used a unique style called ‘cut up writing’. He would cut up texts and rearrange them to create new sentences, which he believed could alter the reader’s state of consciousness and even induce trance-like states. He thought this could help break down cultural and linguistic programming, and he often included elements of violence in his work. The text also discusses the importance of handwriting and reading in today’s digital age, and how information is a powerful tool that can shape our reality.
➡ This text discusses the power of knowledge and how it can be interpreted differently by different people. It also explores the impact of various forms of media, like books and radio, on our imagination and understanding. The text further delves into the concept of characters in literature and how they can become real in our minds. Lastly, it questions the origin of thoughts and the reliability of our memories, suggesting that our minds can fill in gaps and create scenarios that didn’t actually happen.
➡ This text discusses the idea of immortality through preserving one’s image or name, and how this concept has influenced various historical figures and cultures. It also delves into the concept of intermediary beings, entities that can be summoned or interacted with through writing or geometric forms. The text suggests that these beings could either be the writing itself or use the writing as a medium to interact with us. Lastly, it explores the idea that geometric hallucinations, often experienced in mystical states, could be the brain directly experiencing its own structure, offering a potentially unmediated form of knowledge and experience.
➡ This text discusses the idea that our brains and beings are fundamentally geometric, and that ancient and Islamic art use these geometries as tools for meditation and achieving altered states of consciousness. It also explores the concept of God as a number or a letter, and the use of writing as a gateway to other realms or entities. The text delves into the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the idea that his stories could be a means for otherworldly entities to penetrate our reality. Lastly, it discusses the concept of language as a constraint and the use of grids in magic and divination.
➡ The text discusses the use of ceremonial magic and the exploration of esoteric knowledge by scholars. It delves into the life of Descartes, suggesting that his cartesian coordinate system may have been influenced by his interest in occultism and alchemy. The text also mentions how influential scientists like Newton were deeply interested in esoteric topics, but this aspect of their work is often ignored or hidden. Lastly, it discusses the importance of alchemy in the development of modern chemistry.
➡ The text discusses the stigma around unconventional concepts in academia, particularly in the realm of chemistry. It suggests that this stigma may stem from historical religious and societal norms, as well as the influence of colonialism and the imposition of ‘professional’ knowledge. The text also explores the idea of information suppression and the potential existence of controlling entities. Finally, it raises questions about the possible connections between occultists and government agencies, using the example of Burroughs, a Harvard graduate who experimented with various fields.
➡ This text is about a man who had various jobs, including a private investigator, exterminator, and journalist. He also tried to join the OSS, a precursor to the CIA, but was denied. There are conspiracy theories about his life, including one about his wife’s death being an assassination. The text also discusses the idea of supernatural experiences and the importance of open-minded conversations about different beliefs and experiences.
➡ Call and leave a message at 407-476-4606, and it’ll be played on the show. If you’re a member on YouTube, thanks for your support! See you all next time.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Juan on Juan podcast. If you’re enjoying the show, consider signing up for the Patreon. There you get ad free content, early access, exclusive episodes, and monthly supporter hangouts. You can find it@patreon. com slash the Juan on Juan podcast. If you don’t like the subscription based models, there are other ways of supporting the show that are linked in the description. End thank you for tuning in and enjoy this episode.
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Available now from Paranoid American. Get your copy@tjojp. com or paranoidamerican. com today, welcome to the one on one podcast with your host, Juan Ayala. The language that we grow up with restricts our thinking and restricts what is possible for us to conceive of. And so he was very influenced by this. But Burroughs takes this to an entirely different level in the sense that he believes that language, as a disembodied entity, the information itself is actually a type of life form, and it’s a type of life form which has constructed your body, your mortal body, your very fragile, temporary body.
It constructs your body to live inside of it, to achieve its own form of immortality. Your mortality, your death, is sustaining another information life form who doesn’t have to die because you die for. It’s welcome back to another episode of the Juan on Juan podcast. Your host, as always, make sure to follow the show on social media at thejuanon Juanpodcast TJ ojp. com call me. Leave me a voicemail.
It’s a three minute, three minute time limit, so please. 407-476-4606 407-476-4606 for those that want more of the show. Patreon. com thejuanonjuanpodcast all that good stuff. You know where to find me. We’re watching this on the YouTube. Make sure to comment, like subscribe. If you’re on the RSS feed, leave a five star review. All that good stuff. Share the show with your friends and family. And joining me, I am very excited for this episode because this guy, I found him originally when I was unfortunately reading William Burrows, and I came across that in an interesting way as well, which we can get into.
But joining us today is Tommy Cowen. Did I say your last name right? Tommy, you did? Yeah. All right. Awesome. Cowen is a fellow Florida man, so welcome to the show for the first time. Tommy, how are you? I’m great. Yeah, I’m doing very well. And thank you so much for having me. Yeah, when I stumbled across your, I stumbled, I found you on YouTube and I listened to a few of your interviews that you did about William Burroughs because unfortunately, these sort of Crowley types, they’re interesting individuals, right? And I don’t know if it’s all for the right reasons, but I listened to, I think, three or four different interviews that you were on and you talked about a few different things.
And then I came across your academia page because I was trying to find a way to contact you. And as soon as I saw the titles to your papers, my nipples became erect instantly when I was like devils in the ink. William Burrows, Brian Geyson, and geometry as a method for accessing intermediary beings. I was like, yo, this is the guy I got to talk to. Okay? So, yeah, that’s how I found your work.
Tommy, do you have any websites? Do you have any books that you want to plug? Anything that the listeners, if they want to check out your further work or your academia page, they can find you on there. Tommy P. Cowen, do you have anything that you want to plug? Just the academia page really, is what I got going on right now. I’m in the middle of a PhD program, so I’ve been extremely busy with that and have allowed publishing and scholarship to somewhat lag a little bit behind other things.
But that’s okay. I’m going to catch up soon. But I’m also an editor at an academic journal called correspondences journal for the study of esotericism. And so I’d love to plug that. Everybody can find it online. If you just type in correspondences, journal should come up. Send me a link to that and I’ll post it in the description for people to be able to click on it and thank you.
Absolutely. That’d be great. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Tommy. I really appreciate it. And before we get deep and dive off the deep, and I have a few basic questions, because it’s not every day that an academic answers my email and is willing to come on the show. They usually stay away from shows like mine because again, I’m here to have a good time.
I’m here for a good time, not a long time. So we crack dick jokes, we make fun of things, and this is a more relaxed sort of thing. You know how academics can be. They can be kind of stuck up and whatever. So why William Burrows? Because I know you did your. What was it that you did on Burroughs? Can you tell me what. I don’t have it pulled up here.
What you got your. What was it? My master’s degree? Was it master’s? Yeah. I didn’t want to say PhD because I know you’re going through that, but what was the title of that? Because I don’t have it pulled up here. Let me see if I can find. I did a master of arts at the University of Amsterdam in religious studies, technically, is what my degree says. But I was in a very specific religious studies track there called western esotericism.
So that’s my scholarly sort of specialty. And my thesis, my master’s thesis was about William Burroughs, and I’m trying to remember what I titled it. Yeah. Spirituality and esotericism in the works of american author William S. Burrows. That’s what I was thinking about. I knew it wasn’t your phd. It was your master’s thesis around this. Why Burrows? And how’d you get even interested in the esoteric and the occult? Because it’s all intertwined in there.
What got you down this path? Yeah, I have been interested in religion and in what we could call supernatural or extraordinary experience for a very long time. But for as long as I can remember, it’s always been something that’s been very interesting for me, even with things like folklore and mythology and stuff like that. But I became much more interested in it when I was 19 and I tried psychedelics for the first time.
And I would say psychedelics changed my life in many positive ways, but it also opened me up to a lot of interesting culture that was not necessarily popular in the sort of white suburban, middle class background that I had. I believe the first psychedelic I ever did was psilocybin mushrooms. I thought they were really profoundly interesting. Continued to experiment. I believe the second thing I tried would have been called hawaiian baby woodrows.
So that’s a type of seed that has lysergic acid in it, which is the base for making lsd, but it’s a psychedelic in its own right. And then the third psychedelic I would have tried was ayahuasca. I did ayahuasca back in 2004. This is all around when I’m around 19 years old. And this got me really interested in esoteric culture because there’s a huge overlap, and I think there’s no good way to make a strong division between drugs and religion.
I think psychedelic substances in particular have been very influential to human spirituality for hundreds of thousands of years. And the ethnographic record I think, supports this. I originally got interested in William Burrows when I saw the David Cronenberg movie, which came out in 1991, but I didn’t see it until about 2004. All of this stuff was happening around 2004, and it’s such a bizarre, beautiful, interesting film. Naked lunch.
Reading burrows. Yes, naked lunch, correct. Sorry. And then once I started reading Burrows, it’s difficult and it’s bizarre and it’s offensive, but it’s also so incredibly unique that I think it repels about 90% of the people who attempt to read it. But there’s a small group of us who get hooked on it for whatever particular reason, I think because it is so unique and it is so mysterious, but also at times incredibly funny.
It has a particular energy that I just don’t find with a lot of writers. Yeah. My introduction to Burroughs wasn’t naked lunch. It wasn’t any of that. It was cities of the red night. And yikes. And I found that doing research, I found information on the cities of the red night in a. I think, I believe it was an OTO forum, and it was about these obscene sexual rights that they were doing.
And then the guy in there said something about, he calls the transmigrants in that story, and the acts that they would do to, again, to project their souls into the next vessel, I guess. And the reason I was looking at this subject matter is because in the community, I talk a lot about the homunculus, the alchemical homunculus, and how there’s tons of lore regarding this homunculus. And I came across.
I was reading about Crowley’s moon child and some other. The moon children, and then I somehow stumbled across that. And when I started reading about Burroughs, because, mind you, the book is super off putting, so it can really do a number on you when you’re reading these sort of things. When I was reading, I was like, this is what people revere. This is the Burrows that everyone’s like.
And when you start to look into his history, you go, wait a minute. Okay, so there’s a lot more to this guy. He murdered his wife. He was a chaos magician. He was doing what? And then all this craziness for Garia. And I told my budy Sb shout out to Sean because he was a little familiar with, yeah, this is the kind of guy where people, again, we wish he wasn’t so interesting.
But there’s something about these, the. And these, what do they call it? The countercultural pioneers where they were kind of against the mainstream. And it was very abrasive, right? But without guys like Burroughs or without guys like Crowley or without guys like Lavey or whoever you want to put in there, a lot of esoteric guys and the occult, we wouldn’t have a lot of the things that we have today, unfortunately.
And the use of writing as some sort of divination tool to me has always been something very fascinating. There’s something magical about writing itself. The cartographer as magician, the architect as magician, the writer as magician. And again, the word magic can be kind of loosely put in there as some sort of device, right? Some sort of device to be able to manipulate reality in some sort of way.
And that’s not too far fetched, because quite literally, the backs of a lot of religions, if not all of them, are based off of writing. They’re based off of texts. I call it interdimensional literature, where it’s these texts that resonate throughout reality. And there’s something about the solidification when you write it down. And one of the basic questions I want to talk to you about is being an academic in this realm of esotericism.
What is esotericism or the esoteric to you from an academic point of view? Because it’s something that you ask someone, what do you do? I’m an esotericist. What is even that? It’s like, well, I study burrows. Who’s that? What is esotericism from the academic lens? I think you’re one of the few academics that I’ve had who’s in that field. Yeah, it’s a great question, and it’s something that is widely debated and widely disagreed upon within the scholarly community.
I studied under a guy named Bauter Hanukkroff, who is considered one of the most important scholars of esotericism today. He’s been at the University of Amsterdam for a long time. He was responsible for setting up one of if not the first academic programs. Where you could get a degree in esotericism studies. He defines it as something which is, he calls rejected knowledge. In the sense that. And he’s very firm about using the specifier western esotericism.
Wherein esotericism defines a particular form of thought. Which is not necessarily religion. And not necessarily science or logic. But uses elements of both of these things. And yet is also this cultural other. Which both religion and science use to distinguish themselves from it. Right. So it is this other suppressed form of knowledge. Which allows us to help define what is science and what is religion. That is, I would think, one of the most popular ways to define it.
But it is controversial. Not everybody agrees. One of my favorite articles on this subject. Was written by a guy named Egel Aspram. Who teaches in Sweden. And he did a linguistics corpus study. Of the word esotericism. As it gets used in this book called the Dictionary of Gnosis. In western esotericism. Which is a really important book that came out some years ago. And according to how people actually use the word esoteric.
It generally is most often used to refer to what we could call special mean. I think that’s a very sensible approach. Because aspram’s actually looking at how the word gets used. In day to day language. In order to build his definition. But that definition also jives with things that other scholars have said in the past. Like an american scholar named Arthur Versle. Who says that gnosis, or gnosis is central to what esotericism is.
This idea that people can achieve altered states of consciousness. That allow them to rend the veil of normal waking reality. And see a level of reality which is deeper. And which is more ontologically primal or ontologically. Right. We’re talking about definitions. We’re talking about language. We’re talking about letters. I learned from your paper the letterism. I wasn’t familiar with that concept. And do you know if Burroughs was inspired by James Joyce.
At know inspiration in his works? Absolutely. He studied literature at Harvard as an undergrad. And read all sorts of things. And was very influenced, I think, by a lot of irish writers. Not just Joyce, but also Yates and Samuel Beckett as well. Because the restrictions of language. Which is one of the core principles surrounding boroughs. This idea of linguistics being a sort of prison, right? Very dickian gnosticism in there.
Where the logos is the living word. And that I heard. I think it was Terrence McKenna talking about it at one point. And there’s things that sometimes mainstream history doesn’t answer. For example, like the gnostics and what gnosis was. It’s like this idea of this sacred sort of knowledge that once you learn it, you know, but then all of the rituals and everything that we have with the gnostics are very obscure.
We don’t know what they were for. We don’t know what this vowel magic was for. We don’t know what any of this was for. And I’ve always thought to myself, I go, well, what if once you learn the gnosis, you fizzle out of reality? You cease to exist? And I think it was burrows, if I’m not mistaken, that speaks about how there’s a string of letters, a string of words that quite literally can unravel you and destroy you, and, I guess, make you not be here anymore.
And that’s always been a concept, because there is things that. Things that we talk about, even the nature of reality. That’s why I love the occult magic. Really, any esoteric ideas? Because they were trying to. How you mentioned at the beginning, like, why is religion a thing? Why are these symbols a thing? There’s obviously something more to it. And I don’t know if the answer is psychedelics. And maybe psychedelics let you peer to the other side and let you.
Right, because it all has to do with the grid, which I want to get into here in a little bit. But this idea of doing away with linguistics and what I got from it was from his works, the reasoning for the obscurity and the nastiness, for lack of a better term, like the uncleanliness of his, to obliterate the consciousness of the reader. Like you’re partaking in a sort of initiation, right, as you’re reading these texts and you’re trying to really process what it is you’re reading.
Can you speak on that? On that aspect of the linguistic constraints, the language being a sort of extraterrestrial virus parasite, if you will. Yeah, that’s something he’s very famous for, saying that language is an alien virus, or language is a virus from outer space. And Burroughs is influenced by a lot of people in this regard. One person he was influenced by was the count Korjivsky, who was a polish american, polish intellectual, early 20th century, who had a lot of ideas about language and how the language that we grow up with restricts our thinking and restricts what is possible for us to conceive of.
And so he was very influenced by this. But Burroughs takes this to an entirely different level, in the sense that he believes that language as a disembodied entity. The information itself is actually a type of life form. And it’s a type of life form which has constructed your body, your mortal body, your very fragile, temporary body. It constructs your body to live inside of it to achieve its own form of immortality, right? So your mortality, your death is sustaining another information life form who doesn’t have to die because you die for it, right? And this has gone over in a little bit more detail in a text he wrote called Apuk is here.
And he gets a little bit more explicit about it, although it’s still extraordinarily difficult to understand. As Burroughs explains it, even at his most explicit, he’s still a little dense. And how do you spell that? You said Apuk is here. A-P-H-P-O-O-K. Apuk is here. And Apuk is one of the mayan gods of death. But one of the things that’s so interesting, I think about Burroughs and about cut up writing in particular, this writing style he developed, where he was cutting up particular texts and rearranging these elements in order to look for sentences that he likes, which would then, once he gets these new sentences, these scrambled sort of sentences, he would then look in his environment for synchronicities to see if they come true.
But he’s also using this type of writing to produce altered states of consciousness. He wrote in a letter to Timothy Leary one time, him and Leary knew each other a little bit, and Burroughs turns his back on psychedelic drugs in 1961. He has an intense period of experimentation with psychedelics, which lasts from the late fifty s all the way through 1961. But in 1961, he just starts having bad trips over and over again.
He can’t have an enjoyable psychedelic experience anymore. So he’s convinced that psychedelics is a tool for demonic entities, or arcons, to take advantage of us. And so he writes a letter to Timothy Leary, trying to convince Leary that drugs are not the way and that you can get high just by reading, right? But reading cut up writings specifically. And I think it’s interesting because when you get into some of these passages from his most unusual or most courageous kind of works, such as the soft machine, and you’re reading this type of experimental cut up writing for long periods of time, 510, 15 pages straight of cut up writing, you do enter a different mode of thinking, and your reading becomes very passive, and you end up slipping into this passive reading and reading several pages that aren’t really registering consciously.
You’re going to this unconscious, sort of trancelike mode, and then you’ll snap back into a real scene that actually has a regular narrative structure. And it’s like jumping around in time as though it’s a dream. And so for him, it was also not just a way to aesthetically represent what dreaming and consciousness is like. But to allow the reader to enter particular trance states for a variety of reasons.
So one reason why you might want the reader to enter a trance stage. Is to sort of break down the cultural and linguistic programming. Which is restricting their thinking in the first place. But there’s also ritual elements involved, most particularly ritual elements of violence. So in the 1968 version of the soft machine, which was published in the UK, which is kind of hard to find now. I don’t think they’ve done a reprinting of it in a very long time.
You begin reading several pages of cut up writing. And then you’re snapped back into a scene of a man in a hotel room in Morocco. Which this hotel room that the guy’s in. Is actually based on a real place in Morocco that Burroughs lived in, that he thought a demonic entity was. And then the demon appears in this guy’s hotel room, and he attacks it. He attempts to kill mean, there’s this incredibly complex picture going on.
Where the book is forcing the reader into a trance state. And then dropping them off in this basically real location. Where this fictional battle with a demon takes place. And what Burroughs believes is probably a real demon that exists there. So he’s using literature to transport his intentions through time and space to this place. And to commit violence against this intermediary being. Whoa. So you said a lot there, Tommy.
The language, alien virus. Information as a sort of life form that uses you as a vessel. You die off for it, and the information continues to live. Wow. And that’s why, when you are reading cut up, it is a lot of times, and I’m sure people can relate and think about this. The powers that be, they don’t want you writing anymore. Actual writing. Writing. Actual pen. Well, obviously, this is an electronic version.
I use a remarkable. But you get what I’m saying. They want you typing, so you’re disconnected. Because my retention, at least for me, goes up drastically when I’m handwriting notes. Obviously, it’s not a. Due to time constraints. It’s not a good choice. But it is something more personable about journaling. You have young also talking about journaling your dreams and all these different things. So the art form of writing itself and then reading, people don’t really read anymore nowadays.
And we literally have all the literature. That we could possibly want at our fingertips at any point. In time. And so getting high from reading, that’s such an interesting concept. I never understood it. And a lot of times when you’re reading a book where your mind starts to wander, and it might not wander on something esoteric or metaphysical, but it might wander about. Like, did I send that email? And you’re still reading.
Or even when you’re doing an audiobook, your mind will wander. You’re not paying attention to the words that are being said. And this can apply to anything, to a movie, to whatever, to a conversation. Your mind will start to wander and you find yourself when you’re reading. Oh, let me reread that again because I wasn’t paying attention. As you’re actively reading, so you go back. But the cut up method is so distracting.
And I’m a Kanye west fan. Right? We know Kanye west hasn’t had the best reputation recently, but there was a song that I always wondered why this part was in it, because again, these artsy types, you’re like, this is what people look up to. This is one of the masterminds. And that one song, lift yourself, that came out in 2018 where at the end it was poopty scoop scoopdy WHOOP whoopty scoopdy poop poopy scoop D.
And it goes on and on in this weird Joyce kind of thing. And now it’s making sense. What if Kanye was sort of tapping into this more joycean than anything? Because when you rejoice, James Joyce is like. It’s like a glossal. Alia, like, what do you what. And it’s about this idea, maybe. I don’t know if they were, I’m sure that they were doing it on purpose, but there was this one quote that I read, I think it was Terrence McKenna, where they talked about how James Joyce said, if humanity was to end, I want this book.
And I think it was either Finnegan’s wake or the other one. I want this book to be what they use. Know, if people find this in the rubble that is left over, it’s the only thing that they find. I want them to rebuild humanity. From all the letters in this book, you’re digging deep if that’s what you want. Your obscure piece of writing that is one of the hardest pieces of literature ever to ever read in the history of literature.
You want them to kick start reality and humanity back again from these words. Yeah. I think it’s really interesting, too, as well, that there’s this explicit connection between the book and the end of civilization. Like, the book must be recovered from the rubble, it’s almost like that is being willed into being. And I think we see this in a lot of esoteric writers, in modernism, that this conflux of esotericism and literature that we see in Burrows, but not just in Burrows, also in Joyce and in Yates and in Plath and like many authors, Ezra Pound, sort of central to this, or if not central, at least in the background of this, is sort of this idea that modernity and modern civilization is an affront to the spirit of human beings.
And it’s a form of violence against our true spiritual nature. And I think part of sort of the dense, confusing nature of cutup is a war on information itself, and a war in which the end of civilization wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. And Burroughs has intimated as much in interviews that depopulation was something he was very concerned with and he thought it would be a really good thing, but that it maybe had to be done through catastrophic means, but he would have been willing to go there, but that modern civilization needed to be taken apart and reduced.
And part of the effort of doing that is this war on information through literary aesthetics. Well, this ties into what we talked about at the beginning, right? And it is, to quote the great Alex Jones, it is an infowar. It’s been about information, depending on which cosmology you follow. It’s been about information since the conceiving of humanity and humankind in the Garden of Eden, in this other realm where it’s like, yo, you can do whatever you want here.
You can have whatever you want here. There’s just one thing you can’t have. What’s that? Don’t eat from that tree. All right, cool. Fair enough. Leave it to a woman to go ahead and do the opposite. Now. I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. Before people go crazy in the comments. It’s a joke. It’s a joke, but we all know that story. It’s about the knowledge of good and evil, right? So knowledge.
And it ties into esotericism, to occultism, to all these things where it’s a group of people having access to knowledge that they believe they should only have access to. Only the initiated will have access to this information to. And I think it was rosicrucian cosmology or symbolism by, I forgot who, 1912, I think it was ran. This has always stood out to me. Where to the uninitiate, this text means one thing, but to the initiated it means something completely different.
Those letters transform and they can read kind of sort of between the lines. And I wasn’t aware that he obviously, I read cities of the red night, where it’s about where essentially the virus, I forgot what he called it, but just kind of makes everyone. It’s making me think of a South park scene where the dad, like, jizzes everywhere. And when I’m reading about this virus that it’s like it drives everybody, man.
They’re just, wow. They’re just jizzing everywhere. It made me think of South park, and I just think those guys definitely are either memetic magicians using memes or something. Because if you think about a rick and morty or like a south park or any obscure, like Ren and stimpy we grew up with, I mean, at least I’m 29. I don’t know how old you are, Tommy, but I grew up with these cartoons that were kind of this sort of literature, but in a different medium, very chaotic, very weird and abstract.
And it’s like, what is going on here? Right? And I think there’s something about writing, something about storytelling and being able to write something down where it’s a different medium, it’s a different sort of media, because you’re able to not, how you said, transport the literal consciousness of your reader somewhere else and let them. And there’s something powerful about letting them themselves visualize what the characters look like, what the scenes look like, versus a movie, where kind of it forces.
That’s also powerful. It forces that picture on you. You ever read a book and then watch the movie and you go, it’s not how I pictured them. You know what I mean? I kind of liked it better when I could read and just kind of form my own picture in my head. And then reading is one thing where you can quite literally, again, due to under the constraints of language, where you can only describe things a certain way.
Right. You can paint a crazy picture, but then you use audio, which they were using. The trans music. I think it was Geissen, right, the trans music. And it made me think of Philip K. Dick’s synchronicity. The sound. The radio, right. When the radio came out, radio is a little bit different. Like, sound is a little bit different because you can add sound effects, and then you can take that immersive experience and drive it deeper.
What was that one thing that they played where people really thought that the aliens were taking over? Do you know what I’m talking about? In the 1950s, Orson Wells doing War of the worlds. Yeah, War of the Worlds. That was radio broadcast, where people were calling, like, oh, my God, there’s aliens taking a 1938 radio drama, the War of the World, 17th episode of CBS radio series. So radio really, also, I guess sound media kind of changes this up because you can add sound effects and every character can have its own voice, and it brings it more alive.
Versus before that, people were just reading things and letting their imagination go wild. So you talk about Burroughs, you quoted him where he’s talking about these entities that spring forth from the devils in the ink, these things that spring forth from the writing. How many characters? Because when you talked about information being a life form, I’m just thinking of how many people within history weren’t even real, and there were just, like, these ink aggregoric beings that sprung forth from these writings, like PythaGoras.
Pythagoras. There’s no written records from PythaGOrAs himself. It was all written after by Imblicus. And it’s like, was PythaGoras one of these devils in the Ink, if you will, that came Forth just from the writing and became alive because of the writing? And if the writing would have never happened, would we have PythaGoras? How many people in history, Tommy, are these devils from the ink that emerged from the ink? Yeah, I mean, it’s an excellent, open sort of question.
And even if PythaGoras was a flesh and blood person, certainly the impact that he had through writing is what allows us to talk about him today and was so much more impactful and important than whatever he could have done during his own lifetime in a particular sense. And maybe this is one of the problems with the immortality of information, or certainly, let’s say, the extended mortality that information has over flesh and blood, is that once the flesh and blood is gone, the information lives on and continues to change and evolve and go through various transformations.
And maybe in some ways, that’s good and that’s bad. If Pythagoras was really not a great guy, maybe it’s better that we just have the stories about him from. You know, maybe Pythagoras actually had a particular doctrine that was well beyond and much more important than what survived in the writing as well. In that sense, information is also a way to obscure the impact that people had during their lives.
It also gets into this particular psychic realm of Tulpa Mancy, or the Aggregor, in the sense of if a character emerges totally from the mind of another person and is put into writing, at what level does it become real? At what level is it actually a flesh and blood or material entity in its own right, because thoughts have materials. And if the character exists in thought, it has to have some material existence that is corresponding to all of that.
And then that brings the question, it’s like, how many thoughts are not even our own? Because that’s also another concept where it’s where do thoughts originate from? And that you can clump that in with what is consciousness? What is reality? What is everything else? Because it’s just making me think of. Again, back to this platonic thought of Plato talking about remembering everything. And there’s something to be said about that, because people remember different lives that they had at one point in time.
And not only that, but this idea of visualization and being able to enter. We can talk about Hinton and being sucked into the cube or into the geometry into the hypercube, right? This sort of weird thing. But the idea of that in your mind can exist an entire universe per se, an entire cosmology. If you look at all these writers and characters, not only characters that are created for a story, but also characters for writing.
They’re called characters, right? Letters are characters. But it’s always fascinating me that I can visualize anything I want at any point in time, things that I haven’t even seen or experienced, where you can visualize that. And I don’t know if it was your paper or what I was listening to, where it talked about how sometimes the mind will come up. So when you’re remembering something, the mind will sometimes come up with scenarios that didn’t really happen when you had that experience, but it fits better with your brain.
I don’t know whether that was your paper or not, because I’ve been reading a lot these past couple of weeks, but it was the idea that when people are remembering something, they don’t remember it, how it’s supposed to be, because sometimes the brain will kick in and fill in gaps for them. So you can’t even trust your own memory sometimes. Right? Speaking of the art of memory or whatever.
But yeah, the brain will come in there and fill things in. And it’s like that idea morphs into something completely different. And I don’t know how many times you’ve been somewhere where you go back and revisit you were somewhere childhood, and you go back as an adult, and it’s completely different than you actually remember it, and it was your brain kicking in. But the concept of being able to visualize monsters, things, landscapes in your mind by just closing it.
And I don’t do sensory deprivation anymore, but when I would do the sensory deprivation. That was one of the things where your mind would just wander to just weird, crazy places. And I think that’s where maybe the mundus imaginalis, in my opinion, is a real place, and you are able to pull things out. And maybe that’s what I know it’s a big word quantum computing does, because, I mean, they’ve talked about how they extract information from parallel realms and drag it down into hours, and they’re able to extract information for that.
What does that mean? I have no idea what that means. But what if I believe that the original computers was this, and I want to get into the quadromancy, I think is what you called it in your paper. But before I do that, there’s a book, or I think it’s a collection of. About. It’s about anesthesia. Athanesius Kercher, the last man who knew everything, by Paula Findlin. I guess that’s how you say it.
And in it, we’re talking about the idea of information living and existing, and essentially, that’s immortality. And there’s something in this book that it was about portraits. At this point in time, I think Kercher was, I want to say 16th century, if I’m not mistaken. Let me double check that before I spread fake news. But Kercher was 17th century, so 16, two to 1680, jesuit scholar. He was a polymath, and he has a very interesting, very interesting history.
But one of the papers, I guess, in this collection is quasi optical palingenesis, the circulation of portraits and the image of kirture. And essentially, they get into the idea of. They believe that they could achieve immortality by having their portrait taken, and that would exist on its own, and it kind of would carry on their. It’s just their image, and it’s quasi optical palangenesis. And I’m a sucker for cool, catchy names.
That’s why I loved your paper. Right. The devils and the ink and the idea of intermediary beings and being able to access that. But, yeah, the idea of existing forever. And I’m in Florida. We’re in Florida, and we have Juan Poncelian, whom might have not even been a real person. Christopher Columbus might have not even been a real person. Right. When you start to look into the history and the idea of immortality, the fountain of youth wanting to achieve immortality, which.
What if you achieve immortality as long as people remember your name? Just simply remembering your name, as long as they remember it for forever. And maybe that’s why the elites, the lizard people, as I like to call them sometimes if they are lizards or not, doesn’t matter. Name streets after themselves. They name buildings after themselves. They name cities after themselves. Like all these different of. The name needs to be alive.
The letters, the characters within that name. That’s the living information, right? That’s the living logos that was frozen. And the Dead Sea scroll, the Nagamadi, whatever it was. Do you have anything to say about. I mean, it’s fascinating to look at Burroughs from this perspective as well. Because he was very influenced by the egyptian book of the Dead. Or the books of the dead, as we might say.
Wherein the Egyptians believed that the soul had to go through an arduous journey after death. In order to achieve immortality. And it wasn’t guaranteed. And so there were particular things that the grieving family or priests or various other officials. Would have to read. In order to guide the soul of the deceased. And Burroughs is incredibly influenced by this idea. And it informs a lot of his work from naked lunch onward.
Wherein the ritual elements of the book. Are not just violence against demonic entities. But they’re violence against demonic entities. In an effort to create his own immortality. So Burroughs sees the books as generating a metaphysical realm. Wherein his soul can enter after his own death. Wow. And you’re not supposed to read the book. It’s interesting, I think, from Burrow’s perspective. The fact that other people did read it.
Was part of this group mind generation. Of the metaphysical realm. Through the consciousness of other people. This was part of the ritual apparatus, let’s say, is the fact that there is an audience. Right? Yeah. The observer effect. I think there’s something to be said about that. And I think that’s why ceremonial magic is a thing. Because the world is a stage. And we all have our entrances and exits.
That’s coming directly from one of the most influential people on the english language. Which some people say it wasn’t even a real person. So you’re making me think about all these people. And these characters. That could be intermediary beings. And I want to talk about that concept, intermediary beings. And then we can get into the square magic. And I have some ideas that I’ve been just kicking around all day waiting to talk to you.
But these entities that can spring forth not only from literature. And from the ink itself, from these books themselves. But also from the geometry. But you can call them whatever you want. You can call them angels. I know you talk about the jinn a lot in the paper. But these idea of outside entities. Now, from your research, so would the writing be the entity or is the writing a medium for these entities to interact with you? And the reason why this is so interesting to me is, and for those that want to believe otherwise, because you’re going to have the people from the train of thought that none of this exists, you have atheists who we’re just here, the pan Spermia, whatever they call it.
We just land on it. And then things evolved and we came forth from that. There’s no such thing as God and all that stuff. And then you have people who believe in the metaphysical and the paranormal and the supernatural and all these other aspects of a different reality. Because there’s so much evidence to account for stories of these intermediary beings, which could be angels, jinn, demons, elementals, if you want to call them that too.
And when you bring in the geometrical aspect of it, you start to go, well, where did we get lost in this etymological prison or puzzle where angles became angels? Right? And if you read some of the literature, these entities you encounter on the other side. I don’t know if you’ve done me. Hit the button. Have you ever done dimethyl tryptomy? You ever done DMT, Tommy? Where people encounter these geometric beings on the other side and they see the grid and all that stuff.
And the grid is part of, again, the psychedelic experience where the mind creates the grid. Can we talk a little bit about these beings? And are they the writing? Do they come from the writing? Is the writing the medium in which they’re able to interact with us? How does it work? Can you break that down for us? Yeah, it’s something which is sort of mind bending to think about in the sense that a letter or a glyph is a geometrical form of some kind.
And so if we create a letter to concentrate on and to try and summon an intermediary being like a gin or a ghost or a God, we don’t necessarily, I think, have to make a particular distinction as to whether or not the God is the letter or the letter simply communicates or creates an environment in which the God can inhabit. It can be all of these particular things.
And one of the reasons why I think geometry is so interesting, and I talk about this a little bit at the end of the devil’s in the ink article, is that I think geometric hallucinations, let’s say, or geometric visuals, which are endogenous, created by the mind itself, right? Which can happen on DMT, like you say, but can also happen under a variety of other circumstances, can happen under LSD, could happen with migraines, can happen if you close your eyes and look at a stroboscope.
Which is another thing that burrows and Geissen experimented a lot with. One of the scientific theories as to why that happens is that the geometric visual is caused by the neurons in the visual cortex directly experiencing their own structure, right? So the geometric visuals are a direct reference to the geometrical structure of the neurons as they’re laid out in the brain. And what this would suggest, and this is, I guess, a controversial opinion that I have, is that I think one of the biggest problems with researching something like mysticism or esotericism is that these extraordinary experiences are said to always be mediated in some way by the brain, right? So the human brain is small and fallible and programmed and imprisoned by culture and experience and all these things.
So how could we trust the truth of anyone’s particular description of the mystical? It’s impossible for the mystical to fit inside anyone’s mind, and I think that’s a fair point. However, I think if we’re seeing the geometric visuals, which are, I think, a transcultural phenomena, in a lot of mystical experience, we see it in very ancient art, we see it in the use of antheogenic or psychedelic drugs, we see it in jewish mysticism, we see it in eastern mysticism.
If we look at the geometric visuals as the brain directly experiencing itself, I think we could possibly argue that geometry, or at least geometric hallucinations, hallucinations of geometry that are made entirely within the brain, are one of the forms of knowledge and experience which are not mediated in any way. It’s the brain directly talking to and experiencing itself in some kind of way. And this would likely be, I think, one of the most primordial kinds of experiences that one could have, which is a reason why it’s so often associated with these mystical states where people do believe they’ve accessed something which is incredibly, imperfectly true.
And at the point at which the brain directly experiencing itself, or let’s say the visual cortex directly experiencing itself, produces this unmediated experience of geometry. At what point do we say that the geometry represents the brain, or the brain is geometry, and therefore the being itself, the living entity itself, is geometric, fundamentally is geometry before it’s anything else. And maybe that’s also the reason why artificial geometries like we see in ancient art or in islamic art and stuff like that, why they are so effective as meditational tools for achieving altered states of consciousness, is that they’re tapping into the truth of the geometric being.
In and of itself. Yeah. Mandalas, they are essentially what they are as carriers, vehicles for consciousness, for whatever. Right. To transport you to another realm. And you mentioned about God perhaps being letters. The Pythagoreans believe God was number. Which what came first? Did numbers come first, or did letters come first? Do we know? Pythagoras would probably say that God is a number letter. There you. Yeah, it happens at the same time.
Interesting. You see how that works? So it’s like you’re worshipping this thing. You have the tetragrammaton you have where God spoke reality into existence. And one of the things that has always fascinated me. Right. So we’re speaking about using writing as a medium or as a gateway, or as a portal, if you will, to entities on the other side. And again, keep in mind that the actual letters itself might be this entity.
Who knows? But Hp Lovecraft’s work, where there’s something about the 1001 Arabian Nights that does something to people, because that was Geysen’s restaurant name that he had, I think it was in Morocco at one point, a 1001 arabian nights, and also a 1001 Arabian Nights was H. P. Lovecraft’s alleged inspiration for his alter ego, Abdul. All has read who was the author of the fictional Necronomicon, where, again, we have this grimoire that is fictional, but then you have secret groups and occult groups that use it as a literal thing.
They believe it was real, right? They believe it’s a real grimoire, and it works. But HP Lovecraft is an interesting one, because I believe, from my research that what if these entities. Right. And the Cthulhu Mythos, the great old ones, the elder gods, the deep ones, are trying to penetrate our reality and our existence through the use of stories, through the use of letters, through the use of books, literature.
And HP Lovecraft has always been one where he birthed, right. No pun intended, this mythos into existence. And they were contacting him during an altered state of consciousness, which was sleep. A lot of his ideas would come from his night terrors. And if I’m not mistaken, was Burroughs also having nightmares as well? Was at one point, where am I making that? Yes. When he was very young. Yes.
He had. Would it came from his experience during. When he was four years old. Right. Where allegedly he had something happen with his nanny at the time. Right? Yes. We’re not entirely sure what happened to Burroughs, but it’s widely believed that he was abused in some way. We know that something happened which caused his nanny to get fired, and she was deported back to England. We’re not super sure what it is.
There’s multiple theories about it. Burroughs, at one particular point, was convinced that what had happened was he witnessed his nanny having a miscarriage, and then he saw her burn in the basement in the incinerator. Certainly possible. It would seem like a very unusual thing to happen. Certainly, if this poor woman did have a miscarriage, it doesn’t seem like that’s something that she should get fired over. Barry Miles, who wrote the Burroughs biography, call me Burrows, came out in 2013.
His belief is that Burroughs was forced to perform oral on his nanny’s boyfriend, which seems probably a more likely scenario for the results of what happened, her getting fired. But, yes, absolutely had nightmares, bad dreams. Burroughs himself was also obsessed with dreams, kept dream journals. His own dreams appear frequently in his cut up writing. There’s actually a Burroughs archive here at Florida State University, which is one of the reasons why I came to do the PhD here.
And there’s a lot of cut ups in the archive from the 1970s. And it’s interesting because it gives us a sense of the particular types of materials that he saw fit to cut up and do divination with. And one of the things that he liked to cut up was his dream journals. Wow. That’s what I love about plot twists that you don’t see coming, right? Because it is kind of cut up where it’s like, you and I love a good plot twist.
Not just any plot twist, where it’s like, oh, I could have seen that coming, but it’s like a plot twist that just completely just baffles you. And I can think of one or two. There was this one movie about how this guy’s wife was inside a computer where they had learned to transfer consciousness. And the entire movie is the guy trying to stop the computer company that was housing his wife’s consciousness.
He was trying to stop them from disconnecting her, because it was like a special time limit or something like that. And then at the very end, they end up disconnecting his wife. But the entire time, it was actually his wife that was trying to save his consciousness from being connected. And he was playing this whole scenario out within the actual computer. So when the movie ends and it’s like, oh, wait, it was his wife trying to save him.
That, to me, is like, that was great. That was executed beautifully, you know what I’m saying? And that’s kind of sort of like cut up, where you can’t really trust what you’re seeing or what you’re reading because you don’t know where to draw the line. And I think, yeah, HP Lovecraft was kind of sort of like that, where it’s very. And I think that’s what horror does. And not only that, but I think it’s called body horror, which I think Burrows had some of that, where it’s like grotesque aspects of man and that gore aspect and the description of these acts that are happening that I guess shocks.
It’s supposed to shock you and try to obliterate your consciousness as you’re reading this and think about it. It’s an initiation as you’re reading this. So take that for what it is. And I wanted to talk about the grid, and this is where, if you have people, you can loosen up. Tommy, let’s go a little bit crazy here for the last 30 minutes, and let’s spec you a little bit, because I’m under the impression, because we’re talking about these beings.
So we’ve talked about language, etymology being a constraint. Sometimes we find it hard to express ourselves with words. That’s one indication there that language is limiting. And then you can evolve that into different mediums of different medias to execute whatever idea you’re trying to convey. You have the idea of writing as a form of divination, as a form of gateway into other realms and perhaps gateways for other entities to come in and out.
And then you have the idea of the grid, which I wasn’t square magic, which I wasn’t aware, went back as far as it did. I think it was nine eightynce that it went back as far. I think it was. Was it the Chinese that came with it first? Or who was it? Anyways, in the muslim world it goes as far back as the 10th century, but in China it’s even before then.
Yeah. So I didn’t know it was that old. But if we fast forward, because you gave me like a historical background on ideas that I’ve been kicking around, because I like the 16th century, 15th, 17th. Right. You have John D. And Edward Kelly, who, again, that ties in everything. It ties in the geometry. It ties in the letters, the numbers and the grids. Right? So the grid is important in that.
And some people will say, well, he was inspired by Trithemius, or did I say it right this time? Trimetheus. Trithemius. Tri themeus. Yeah, yeah. Johannes tri themius with his stenographia, where it was again, some people say it was code for was. I forgot how they put it. But it was like an occult book, coding something or was it whatever. Anyways, it was a secret cipher and allegedly you could use it to communicate with these angels.
So it was sort of angel magic, tapping into other realms. John D. Allegedly took inspiration from that. But it’s interesting about John D because Enochian has a syntax. It is a real language. When it’s broken down by linguists and etymologists, I guess is what I forgot. Who was his name? Something dick. He did the Enochian encyclopedia. Encyclopedia. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but his name was.
I’m not. His name was, I’ll tell you right now so people can check it out. The Donald C. Lacock. It’s the complete Enochian dictionary. I believe he was either a linguist or a. Anyways, he studied languages and he broke it down in Enochian that was revealed from these intermediary beings and passed down to Edward Kelly. And John D. Was obviously the scribe has a real application. It can be used and it is used in ceremonial magic.
Right. And again, if you can extract information from these, I’m not an occultist. Did you ever, and you don’t have to answer, but did you ever cross the line, Tommy, when you’re reading about all this craziness and you go, I want to try that. Did you ever cross that line? Did you join any secret organizations, Freemasons, whatever? And you don’t have to answer the question, but did you ever cross the.
I’ve done a lot of spiritual and magical experimentation, let’s say. Yeah, I’ve definitely tried things, and I think a lot of scholars of esotericism, even though they are kind of stuck up and they pretend to be agnostic, I think for professional reasons, a lot of people in my field have experimented at some point with the things that they study. I have never joined a particular magical order in the traditional sense, although I’m from Sacramento, California, and there’s an Oto lodge in Sacramento that at the time was run by a couple named David and Anna Shoemaker who are somewhat prominent thelamites.
And I used to hang out there a little bit. So I don’t know, this was quite some years ago, probably more than 15 years ago, maybe it might be 20. I’m not sure. I don’t know if they would recognize me these days, but I would certainly recognize them if I met them again, interesting. I was just curious because that’s a question I get asked a lot. Like when you’re reading about these grim wars and all these things, are you not tempted to try it? And it’s like, yeah, it is tempting, but the grid.
And I’m under the impression, I don’t know if you’ve ever read the secret journal of Rene cart. And it’s by secret journal of Rene Descartes by his name is hopefully I’m saying this right, Amir Axel, and he’s passed away now. But it was about this secret journal that Descartes had. And Labnaz, the father of binary code, set out to copy and find. And it was this weird, obscure code we never really know.
Supposedly he cracked it. But Descartes is a really interesting character to me, and maybe, perhaps not on paper. Was he an occultist or involved in any order? Some people say that he was. But the concept of the cartesian coordinate system and how that itself, not only is it a grid, but it adds axis and that as a vehicle for manifestation. And the concept that the Platonists were obsessed with geometry and kind of sort of projecting their ideas into geometric figures.
I think that Descartes through his. So through a series of dreams he essentially had. So the official narrative of history is that he had a series of dreams. And through those series of dreams he had figured out the secrets, right? The most profound discovery ever. And then there’s this other story that he came up with the coordinate system because he liked to sleep in. And he was laying in bed one night and he was watching a fly on the wall.
And he’s like, how can I pinpoint how this fly is? How can I translate that? Right? Like, well, c three. Oh, there’s the fly. And from that, essentially from a fly, supposedly he came up with the cartesian coordinate system. I think it came from his dreams. And the dreams that he had. It was a series of dreams which he writes about. And maybe on paper he wasn’t an occultist.
I believe he was. And I have my own reasons for that. I’ve covered it on the show before. But the concept of him perhaps giving the key for essentially all of mathematics and everything through this grid. And it’s tied. And that’s what’s always fascinating me, that it’s this grid that was passed down, who knows from where. But he was surrounded by alchemists. And I would tie an alchemist with occultists.
In my opinion, it’s a form of occultism, alchemy. But he was closely associated with a lot of alchemists and prominent ones. The one that killed him, Christina Sweden, who she was, had collections of various books and was surrounded by a corps of alchemists, right? I mean, some people say he was a rosicrucian. I mean, again, there’s no solid evidence that he was using mathematics as a sort of divinatory device, but I believe that he was able to come up with this cartesian system and use mathematics as a sort of mythsis where it’s like the worship of numbers.
But mind you, again, we talked about at the beginning how many of these characters were even, I think, Descartes was real, but how many of these characters not only were embellished or suppressed from history through writings and through the information that’s passed down from them. Like NASA doesn’t want you to know about Parsons and how he was singing and doing the hymn to pan before every rocket launch.
That doesn’t look good when it’s too woo woo and it’s getting too close to home. So let’s do the same with a whole bunch of people. Throughout history, he was building automata. And we stumbled across a book that I’ll send to you after from the 17th century, where allegedly he had figured out how to project his consciousness into outer space. But it’s all centered around this geometry, this grid, this square magic.
And if you take that. So the cartesian coordinate system is at the core of everything. I don’t know if you’ve ever done cad Cam. I have 3d design. It’s at the core of that and how that’s a sort of manifestation. The architects would take these grids and all these things, and they would birth these buildings that they referred to as their homunculi because it was impregnated in their mind.
From there, they took it down into a paper medium. They would make sometimes a lot of times they would make models, and from there, the actual building would be erected after the fact. Right? And it’s all done again through this use of the grid a lot of times. And Descartes. So I forgot where I was going to go with this. But the idea of Descartes tapping into something much deeper than himself.
And I don’t know if you know anything about Descartes or not, but do you have anything on the cartesian coordinate system as far as. Because that you can use it, right. You have the longitude and latitude system, which John D. Is tied to as well. And that’s a sort of grid. And maps back then, not only were they to show locations of places, cartography, but they were also used as talismans.
And I think it was in the cities of the Red Knight, where they jizz on a map to find treasure, so they charge it, and then I guess it comes to life and it shows them where the treasure is. I think it was like at the end, where everyone’s going crazy. But do you have anything on the cartesian coordinate system and perhaps it being some sort of divinatory device? Did you stumble across that during your square research, your quadramancy research? I don’t know that much about Descartes, to be honest, and he didn’t come up when I was doing research for that article.
But it does strike me that the cartesian coordinates are very pythagorean in a particular way. And that in order to make the particular type of graphs, you need a letter and you need a number, and you need the regulation of these geometric shapes, these squares. And so in that sense, the graphs that you produce from cartesian coordinates really sort of represent this pythagorean idea of the letter number shape as this one entity that contains all of those particular things at the same time.
And it wouldn’t surprise me at all if Descartes was very interested in esoteric knowledge and alchemy and things like know. Isaac Newton, who’s one of the most influential scientists know, likely as influential as Descartes, was really interested in esoteric topics. He was profoundly interested in alchemy, and he was really interested in bibliomancy and using the Bible as a form of textual divination. And that stuff got buried and hidden for years.
Nobody ever wanted to talk about it, and people still don’t want to talk about it. If you go to a conference today, which is not, let’s say it’s not an esotericism studies conference, let’s say it’s just about a history of science conference or a conference just about the life of Newton, and you start talking about alchemy or bibliomancy, there will be scholars there who will tell you that you shouldn’t do this and that we shouldn’t talk about this and that, it tarnishes the legacy of Newton.
Yeah, he was also writing commentaries on the book revelation, drawing up diagrams of the temple of Solomon, speaking of geometry and certain things like that. And yeah, it is something. Why do you think that is, that they stray away from? Because in my opinion, if it wasn’t for alchemy, we wouldn’t have chemistry. Because essentially it was the pursuit of this philosopher’s stone, of these alchemists, is what led to a lot of different discoveries, and it was the precursor of chemistry.
But why there’s such a stigma in this academic realm, and that’s why a lot of them don’t agree to come on the show. And I didn’t see that one of your supervisors is actually Peter Foreshaw, which I’m a big fan of his work. And I think I’ve reached out to him before. So if you want to put in a good word for me, his work on. Was it the.
I forgot this guy’s name. It’s on the COVID of one of my Zines and I can’t think of. Was it Heinrich Kunrath? Kunrath, yeah, exactly. Heinrich Kunrath. And that concept. Right. The perspective, I think it’s called first person perspective, where that kind of does something to you as well. Because through the use of this grid kind of sort of thing, the alchemists were. So we have this evolution of media.
So you have writing, you can use it to enter visionary states. And then you have these mandalas. And then these alchemists would quite literally use these paintings or these plates of lab scenes or whatever, and they would enter these scenes using the geometry in these scenes to work in those labs. So it’s funny how that all evolves and it comes essentially from, you see, the evolution. But yeah, I’m very familiar with his work and I think I have reached out.
He’s looked at my academia page one time I think he did. Pretty sure it was him. But why do you think that is the stigma with wanting to get woo woo? I don’t think it takes away credibility. I mean, we’re all human, right? I think you can’t be 100% stoic when it comes to these sort of topics, right? Because they do come from somewhere, and it comes from guys like Burroughs who they push the limits, they make new frontiers to be explored because they’re pushing those lines further and further.
And it’s paving the way for people to go up to that line and keep pushing it further and further. And again, you don’t have to answer the question as to why it’s such a stigma within the academia. But do you want to give input as to why maybe they are so hesitant to let people bring forth these two woo woo of concepts to the public? I guess we know it’s there.
Yeah, it’s a really complex picture and there’s a lot going on. I think a big part of it comes from the history of Christianity and the history of state religions in the western world, in the muslim world as well, where there are particular ways of talking about religion that are seen as dangerous to society, and they carry very grave penalties. I mean, in the case of al Halaj, the penalty is death.
For having the wrong religion. Even though al Halaj also claimed that he was muslim and that he knew the truth about Allah, it didn’t jive theologically with the standard state perspective. And you have a lot of similar stuff coming in the Middle Ages, in the christian era and stuff like that. And especially once the new world is discovered and we have the domination of the Americas, the beginning of the colonial era, and this intersects with also the beginning of population sciences as well.
And this is when witch hunts really become a big deal, is sort of after the discovery of the new world. There’s a really great scholar named Sylvia Federici, and she writes about this a lot, about how a lot of the fear of witchcraft was articulated with population sciences, where they were trying to get women to stop performing. And so one of the ways in which they could do this was talking about how was the province of the witch and witchcraft, right? And so it’s a way of justifying the state’s interests through religious aesthetics.
And we see this in the Americas as well, in the sense that one of the reasons how Europeans were able to justify their domination of the indigenous Americans is that they’re not christian, right? So it’s for their own good that we bring them Christianity. Then eventually this gets articulated with professional, not just within Europe. Proper professional is influential to witch hunts, but it’s also influential to the colonization of indigenous Americans in the sense that a lot of indigenous is reliant on altered states of consciousness and on contact with particular intermediary beings for the purposes of healing.
And initially, if we’re talking 15th, early 16th century, this is coming from a very christian, dogmatic, religious perspective. But by the time we get to the 19th century, it’s often justified through purely secular means, right? So we need to break these people of their indigenous, of their traditional spiritualities because they don’t have the proper. They don’t have quote unquote professional. Only we can give this to them. And I think that perspective borrows from christian dogma to a certain extent, maybe not explicitly in its own representation of itself.
It certainly borrows the same attitude from christian dogma, that it’s for indigenous Americans own good, right? That we take their religion from them. But this idea that professional should be forced upon you at the expense of your tradition, I think this is alive and well in our society today. I think this is influential to the stigma that we have around strange religion, in the sense that allowing people to believe something which is not part of a professional code of population science, which professional is certainly part of population science today is not only a threat to them and their health and their population, but especially in the area, it’s an effect on all of us, right? We’re all, all in this together.
So therefore, forcing particular knowledge upon you also requires stripping you of the knowledge that you think. Probably most of the scholars that would have this stigma of Newton being an alchemist or Newton being a bibliomancer, they would never say all of that explicitly. And probably most of them would tell you that they’ve never thought anything like that in their life, and they don’t actually believe in any of that.
We can’t project any of that onto them, which is fair enough. But I think the stigma is a dogma, and it does have a legacy in the colonial project, in the dogma of professional and the dogma of population science that was very effective for the colonial project. What if that’s another form of this, I guess, letter parasite, or what I dubbed it? I don’t know if there is anything else, and I looked it up, but grammatical entities, these things that pop forth from how we’re talking about information, we’re talking about writing, it’s all about information.
It’s about the suppression of information. And you can apply that to anything and everything, essentially throughout life, because that includes religion, that includes everything, regular life, everything. And what if that’s another one of these aspects of it trying to take over in some sort of way? But then that would imply that there are entities, Arcons, that are trying to take over, and then Arcons is a bit. Arcons is a weird one, because it’s a gnostic view.
And then that would insinuate that this reality is a false reality and that we’re living in a simulation, right? So that one to people, it puts them off. Like when you talk about gnosticism and simulation theory and all these things, because it’s like, well then, is any of this real? Are you a Boltzman’s brain? As I always ask people? Are you just a blip in existence for 1 second in your entire lifetime? I think it’s like when people take Salvia and they live an entire lifetime and they remember the whole thing.
It’s really scary. But had a couple miscellaneous questions. Was Burroughs ever? Because there’s this idea that a lot of these people and these concepts that they’re bringing forth are tied to governmental, governmental agencies, three letter agencies, because I know he was in touch with Leary and a couple other interesting figures. Does he have any links to. Because it seems like a lot of these occultists were also spies, and they’re kind of planted in culture to make these crazy movements.
Right? Like a Crowley was mi six or mi five, whatever he was. Is there any connections with Burrows and three letter agencies at all? Or governmental? Because he went to Harvard. I mean, that’s pretty up there, you know what I mean? And a lot of these guys are set up like they have inheritances and they have all the time in the world to sit in a hotel with his buddies to do seances and scrying for hours upon end and do all these things to conjure up and open up portals to other realms, and then there’s the devil manifesting in front of them.
Well, all these crazy things. Is there any evidence that he was tied to any three letter agencies? Was he a spy? Do you have anything on that? Well, it’s an interesting question. It’s been theorized that he was secretly CIA. So we know that Burroughs, as a young man in his 20s, was floating around and trying lots of different things and was generally competent at most of these things, but never really fell in love or became a master of any of them.
So he was a private investigator at one point. He worked as an exterminator. At one point, he worked as a journalist. He went to school and then dropped out. He got into an anthropology program and dropped out a couple of anthropology programs and dropped out. One of the things that he tried in this era was he actually did apply to go to the OSS, which was the precursor to the CIA.
According to Burroughs, his application was denied. And supposedly, according to him, there was somebody he knew from Harvard who was working in the OSS at the time. And he claims that this guy never liked him, and that’s why he didn’t get into the. So that’s kind of the official story, but there’s a lot of conspiracy theories out there about. How true is any of that? I found this one article which amused me greatly.
I forget what it was on some particular right wing website, and it basically was just talking about how it’s all. Burroughs was definitely CIA, and Joan, his wife, who was accidentally shot in the head during a William tell performance in Mexico City, 1951. That was actually not an accident. He claims Joan was assassinated because she was an agent. Right. And Burrows was a counteragent, and so she had to.
There’s definitely a lot of stuff out there where people would disagree with the official and the wife story. You believe. Was it the William tell act? You believe that it went down like that because a gay man, I guess he was bisexual. We don’t know if he was having relations with his wife, but that would make sense where you could use a wife as a cover. And she knew what he was doing.
He was falling in love with boy toys wherever he was at. I haven’t dove into that aspect of the conspiracy, but from my research and from the community, they like to talk about how a lot of this alien talk nowadays, and even interdimensional beings, are a plant of these three letter agencies, because you have the famous Ronald Reagan speech where it’s like, if we could all come together, there was some sort of alien invasion.
It’s like, well, that’s evolved over time. It’s like, are these interdimensionals? Are these ultraterrestrials? Are these extraterrestrials? Like, what’s going on? Well, leave it up for the people to figure it out on there. Let’s let the people birth these egregoric beings into existence. And then you have Carl Jung talking about, know, these are projections of our psyche, projections of our subconscious. Like, what? And it just starts with one thing.
Just talk about it, and then it’ll develop. And that’s why I’m very careful with what I say. Not to be superstitious, but very careful with what I say. Very careful with be careful. What is it? Careful what you wish for, right? They tell you that. And there was that one talk of Burrows where he’s talking about the wishing machine, and he’s talking about the monkey paw story, and it’s like, well.
And he keeps saying, I wouldn’t wish for something like infinite knowledge or. No, no, for infinite. That’s because he got the blueprint for this wishing machine. He said that he tried and he did some weird experiments with it. And he keeps saying, I wouldn’t wish for something so stupid, like infinite money. I would ask for something. He was, like, talking to you, kind of telling you, like, if you ever do encounter, like, an intermediary being, make sure you ask for wisdom or for something that’s not money.
Don’t ask for money because Edward Kelly tried to ask for money and the angels got pissed off. So don’t do that. At one point in time, he did ask him for some money because he was in a bind, but. Tommy, did you have any closing thoughts? Thank you for risking your reputation to come on this podcast and speak with me today. I had a lot of fun. Hopefully I didn’t ramble on too much, but, yeah.
Do you have any closing thoughts before we leave the people and plug your stuff again, for the people, if they want to follow you on academia and anything you want to leave them with. Yeah. First of all, yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure to be here. I also had a lot of fun. Yeah. And I guess my overall mission in writing about people like William Burroughs, but also David lynch now a little bit, and Yates.
And this is the reason why I think podcasts like this are so great, is that there is this stigma about esoteric religion, about heterodox religion, or weird religion, and definitely a stigma about people who have had what we could call supernatural or extraordinary experiences. But I think if we really look at it, it’s not that uncommon. Right. It’s not that uncommon for people to have extraordinary experience. It’s not that uncommon for people to have weird beliefs.
And I think if we can look at these canonical, highly regarded literary figures like Yates and Pound and Joyce, but also Burroughs and Ginsburg, and say people like Ishmael Reed, if we can see that weird religion produces these literary masterpieces, it’s a way of part of normalizing the weird to speak about it sort of paradoxically. And I think that’s something that’s super important to do, because otherwise we end up with the satanic panic and Damien Eccles, and we end up with people doing time for things they didn’t do.
Absolutely. I’m with you there to a certain extent, Tommy. I think that there are lines that need to be drawn. But again, who am I? I’m just a podcaster. I know nothing. But. Yeah, I agree with you again, there are a lot of things that put me off when it comes to a lot of these occultists. But if it wasn’t for them, I try to be as unbiased as I can be when it comes to any subject that I speak about.
I do have my core beliefs and values that I keep to myself. But I like having interesting conversations, and I like to talk to different people and hear their perspective. And it’s okay if we don’t agree on everything, but at least you were mature enough and open enough to have, because a lot of people don’t even want to talk, right? We’re so divided, not just politically, but in so many ways, and people can’t even come together to have conversations anymore.
I think it’s important to speak about things and be able to learn as much as you can. Maybe not learn everything. How my five year old thinks that you can know everything in the entire world. And kids, really, when they ask you certain questions, you go how did you even come up with this? Who are you? And sometimes I’ll look at my kids and be like, who were you guys in the past life? Where’d you come from? So when my five year old asked me, he asked me, he thinks I know everything because you’re fixing things for them and you’re helping them out.
And I thought to myself, I told him, I said, I don’t know everything. He goes, well, why not? I said, damn. Can you imagine, Tommy? Can you imagine knowing everything in the entire world? Knowing all cosmologies, all religions, everything that there could ever be to know, just knowing it, that would be crazy. That would be wild to know absolutely everything? And I was like, yeah, there’s just no way you can.
He’s like, no, but who says you can’t? I go, there’s a lot you still have to learn, little Padawan. Right, young Padawan? So, Tommy, I’m going to have to have you back on again. Once I finish Twin Peaks, I want to have you back on to talk about it because I’m almost done with season two. I’m like, episode 20 of season two. So I’m almost done. And I hear season three is I’m going to watch the movie firewalk with me after season two.
And then I think there’s another movie after that, right? There’s another movie. Was there a second movie? I think there’s just one movie. But, yeah, season three is quite long and all the episodes are an hour. Yikes. All right, well, we’re going to do this. There’s a book, too, isn’t there? Yes, there’s a couple of books. Oh, there’s a couple of books. Yeah, the books are good. I was told that it was going to be a grind, and I’m here for it.
I’m grinding it out. And the first season was an initiation. I got past the first season, and I need to be rewarded once I get to the end of this tunnel. So we’ll see. But once I finish that, Tommy, I’ll hit you up. And if you’d like, you’re going to get plenty of good feedback from my people. My people are good people and they’re open minded. So hopefully you’ll be up for coming on again and talking to us.
I’ll make sure to post your links in the description. Tommy, again, thank you so much for being here with me tonight. And as always, everyone, make sure to follow the show on social media at the Juanjuan podcast tj ojp. com. Call in, leave a voicemail I’ll play it on the show. 407-476-4606 patreon. com thejuanonjuanpodcast if you’re a YouTube member, shout out to you, appreciate you, and as always, everyone see you on the other side.
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