Parallax Newsletter #110: Sex, Death & the Occult, by Layman Pascal
A Intriguing New Course from The Serious Playground
I. An Autumnal Temptation
This Fall, I will be orchestrating a 6-week online Xagick course with Rachel Hayden from Queer Liminal & The Temple of the Starving Moon.
If you are curious about this, you will join a participatory pilgrimage that will enact a step-by-step magical “working” — sourced in the emerging intentions, deep desires, and aspirational commitments that you will bring into the field of this special event.
To prove you are being drawn, read on:
II. Magical Education
Each session of the course will be a piece of the extended ritual. However, each chapter will also feature general lessons about occult history, esoteric theory, emerging principles of Xagick (the new occult discourse), as well as many immediate exercises to build up your capacity for the basic skills of enchanted living.
We will be cultivating the potency of our magical bodies.
This course will go further & deeper than the 4-week Teratogenic Mystique process hosted last year by Parallax. People tantalized by that course will have the opportunity to deepen those connections and grow beyond the introductory steps. Yet this is not a continuation. It is something different.
This event is opening wider to embrace all readers of this Substack, any members of the general public who are curious to gain more fluency in the history & future of occultism, as well as all those who wish to enrich their ontological agency and liminal power.
Today the “occult” survival of shamanic and esoteric skills is still widely marginalized, demonized & infantilized. What lies beyond the lurid aesthetics of sorcery, adolescent phantasies of witchcraft, psychotic ideations, and narcissistic New Age mumbo-jumbo ?
Things like this:
· Agency.
· Intention.
· Mystery.
· Desire.
· Alternative Sensemaking.
· Embodied Spirituality.
· Subtle energy work.
· Subconscious influence.
· Entities (personal, imaginal & collective)
· Trance states.
· Imaginal Virtuosity.
·
These are the territories we will be exploring and practicing within — but two main themes will frame our shared adventure:
III. Sex & Death
The overarching themes of Sex and Death will be a throughline for our shared experiential contemplation. These exciting issues point toward the edges of human experience. They evoke deep symbolic & energetic aspects of our multidimensional embodiment. Both our personal and our collective subconscious intelligences are powerfully arranged around these twin flavors. And the forces of Eros and Thanatos have been preserved, analyzed, and worked with primarily by those communities that are regarded as “magical” or “hermetic.”
Sexuality is the vital regenerative capacity of the human being. It invites our exploration of clarified desire, polarized energy flow, creative manifestation, and deeply visceral yearnings that are often too hot or too weird for conventional spirituality. How we engage with allurement and biopsychological arousal, particularly in their subtle qualities, is one of the deep drivers of occult wisdom.
Death is the quintessential limit-condition. Heidegger tells us that death is the possibility of the end of possibilities. That threshold boundary represents every kind of boundary and threshold that governs our lives and haunts our psychology. Even if you access forms of embodiment that go beyond conventional mortality, you nonetheless still exist in dynamic confrontation with the End of Things. How do we work with this disturbance? How do we infuse our lies with the wisdom of Death? Are we capable of bodily surrender? Can we assimilate the “dark” charge of finitude? What skills does it take to enter the uncanny charnel ground in which our old selves perish and our new selves become capable of a re-enchanted world?
Sex and Death are the guardians of transition.
IV. The Whole Trans Thing
At the very core of all this stuff, we are studying transitions. The occult is the practical and theoretical explorations of transformations of our life-conditions and sensemaking.
Transgender transformations represent an iconic form of magic in which desire and intention lead to the reshaping of flesh, identity, and society. It is powerful. And it points back toward the shapeshifting transsexual and trans-embodied play of the protean shaman-magicians of the archaic human past. To change ourselves and to change our world is the goal of magical wisdom.
It involves transrational explorations into imaginal, nonlinear, and esoteric domains. It also requires transpersonal expansions into the psyche of the ancestors, egregores, intersubjective fields, future human species and the cosmic ecosystem in which we are embedded. All these extraordinary trans-es point toward a single great truth that I will call trans-ontological agency.
That means the ability to be a pro-active participant in the imaginal level of reality that operates between-and-beyond our basic categories of existence. There are experiential and empowering entities, capacities, knowledge and leverage that exist in the intermediary subdomain of reality. How do we transition from subjective to objective patterns? What communicates between human and inhuman domains? Where do the rational and irrational intelligences meet? What does it take to cross-fertilize the Concrete and the Subtle?
This unique course and process on the Occult will help you (and require you) to increase your embodied presence, insight, and power to re-script reality at the trans-ontological layer. It will do so with lectures, exercises, videos, readings, ritual serious play, intersubjective field production, invocations, safe transgressions, subconscious development, and another entirely mysterious quality that may already be beginning to affect you…
Get better at magic.