Against Everyone with Conner Habib

AGAINST EVERYONE WITH CONNER HABIB 328: HORROR UPON HORROR PT 2 - DAN CHAON on HIDDEN LIVES and 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE

Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib. This is Horror upon Horror.

Friends, we all have hidden lives. From the lives of our internal organs, which are working within you right now, to the lives that we imagine and fantasize for ourselves yet will not achieve. The most obvious, and yet in some ways the most hidden life, is that life of death itself.

We carry this death within us every day. The skeleton which lurks just beneath our flesh, washed by fluids and blood each day, is death's emblem.

And each of us makes our own deaths the project of our lives. Every step draws us closer, every action has a result, an effect, that shapes the way in which we will change from a living person to a dead one.

Inside all of our choices, there lives death.

The same is true fro the lives of civilizations, which hide away the seeds of their own demise in the flourishes of progress. In apocalypse movies, death reveals itself as the coexisting state. This is most apparent in Nia DaCosta's 28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE, the movie my guest DAN CHAON chose to talk about on this episode.

In Dan's fiction, hidden away lives lead people down the path to their own doom. In his frightening story “The Bees" in which a man’s second, secret, hidden family, creeps back into his circumstances and destroys the life he’s built for himself. In his novel Await Your Reply, in which a man looks into sinews of conspiracy to figure out where his brother has disappeared to. Of course, to look at sinews is to cut into anatomy, to bleed out.  And in Chaon’s latest, One of Us (which takes inspiration for its title from the 1930s Todd Browning film, Freaks)  the lives 1915 circus performers are explored, as well as the lives of two children fleeing a murderer who speaks to the dead.

The lives we hide away always whisper to us. They have their own secret voices that ask:

Can your surface-life endure me? Or will your world end the second I’m revealed?

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Six authors. Four horror movies. Four episodes of Against Everyone with Conner Habib

This is HORROR UPON HORROR

On these episodes, we'll be thinking through the creation, reading, and viewing of the most vital and visceral art: Horror, and I'll be doing it with the frightening luminaries of the genre. People who are unafraid to endure the horrific imagination, and able to bring it to you.

On this first episode, I’ll be talking about nostalgia in horror with authors Nathan Ballingrud and Sarah Maria Griffin and then we'll move onto our discussion of the amoebic violent power of Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob.

Unlike other monsters, the blob has no direction, no real personality. It doesn’t want anything. It’s not even hungry; hunger would imply some sort of desire or longing. Instead, it’s drawn to whatever is close and warm, drawn to incorporate it, to grow with the heat of flesh, bone, and blood.

As it gets bigger, it needs more heat, more blood, to keep going.

This is Horror upon Horror. The blob. A form older than vampires but newer in consciousness. It’s outside of time. It’s what was in the microscope made large, larger, until it envelops everything in its path with crushing pressure and dissolving acidity.

The blob is the pure inertia of motion.

NATHAN BALLINGRUD has also been on the show before, last time talking with me and Sara Gran on AEWCH 233 about cruelty in horror. His book of short stories, North American Lake Monsters is one of my very favorite horror collections. And his trilogy of retro future horror, The Lunar Gothic trilogy, begins with the utterly hideous (in the best way possible), The Crypt of the Moon Spider.

SARAH MARIA GRIFFIN⁠ is the author of the psychic vampire botany horror novel, ⁠Eat the Ones You Love⁠, and most recently ⁠Strange Is the Light⁠. Sarah has been on the show many times (her latest until now was ⁠AEWCH 252 ⁠where we talked about working as writers) and does an annual tarot reading event for patreon patrons.

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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!

Using AEWCH 317-320 as a starting point, I talk with JOSHUA RIVERS, poet and host of the excellent BUSY BEING BLACK podcast + frequent AEWCH guest, SHULI BRANSON (host of the podcast THE BREAKUP THEORY podcast, and translator of Guy Hocquenghem's Gay Liberation After May '68.) about the small task of remaking the world.

At the center of the episode is a thought that's something like: We have to lose - via transformation - so much to gain the world.

The last time Shuli was on the show was a conversation with a third person, too, with Dean Spade on AEWCH 277 thinking through how to think bigger than the state.

On that episode, we each brought a question for the other two guests, and we do that again - but this time prompted by Josh.

These are the questions:

JOSHUA: How do you care for what you love?
CONNER: If you let go of the set of capitalism vs communism (or socialism) what’s left in your view of how to change the world?
SHULI: How do you open things up so that you have a new and altered view?

Along the way we talk about poetry, science, occultism, politics, and...well, so much else. And the episode ends with dancing. I'm so excited to share this episode with you.

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Like many people, I often feel that I don’t understand economics, but, like everyone, I have my own role to play in the economy. So do you. So does everyone. We are all in economy, so we all have something to offer in understanding it.
AEWCH 24 guest Erin Ryan once joked that  “Economics is astrology for dudes” 

Economics feels intentionally mystified, filled with untruths and abstractions, and hopelessly complicated. Those who claim they do understand it are usually people (certain kinds of men, as per Ryan’s joke) who use the economy in a certain way, and are therefore limited to a certain view of it.

Because we are kept at arms length from economic understanding, we have to resort to questions like, “Why is this piece of paper worth something?” or , “Why do numbers moving from one account to another mean something?”

If we're not outright ridiculed for asking, we are often left without much more than broad answers that are detached from history and that lead us away from doing anything about whatever we’ve learned.

But these are the questions we need to ask, and we need to come up with new answers.

This is fourth episode in my series of episodes called A New Spiritual Society, working through how to renew, revitalize, and re-engage with culture, politics, and economics by looking at their spiritual heart. 

This episode stands on its own - but you can also enrich the listening by starting with the introduction to this series on AEWCH 317, if you want to hear more about how and why I’m approaching. AEWCH 318 is on culture, and AEWCH 319 is on politics.

I hope you find this look at the spiritual heart of economy gratifying, and a help in circulating new perspectives that are closer to the truth.

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Friends, we might not feel up to the task, of changing the world, but not only are we up to the task, but we are all engaged with it already. Shaping the world is part of being alive and we all contribute, whether we know it or not.

This episode is part of my series on the social art of renewing, rethinking, and revitalizing the social organism:

A NEW SPIRITUAL SOCIETY

This time, I talk about POLITICS - why politics in our time is about so much more than elections, political parties, protests, and laws. It's about time, utopia, and connection.

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