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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Nori with you.

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Speaker 2: Carl Abramson back with us a Swedish author who has

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Speaker 2: written more than twenty books, many of which deal with

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Speaker 2: magic and the occult. His research has led him to

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Speaker 2: come in contact with and become friends with many who

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Speaker 2: study who have studied the occult as well. One of

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Speaker 2: his latest books, Meetings with Remarkable Magicians Life in the

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Speaker 2: Occult Underworld. Carl, welcome back. How have you doing.

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Speaker 3: Thank you very much, very nice to be back. I'm

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Speaker 3: doing fine here. Thanks.

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Speaker 2: Things are well in Sweden, yeah they are.

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Speaker 3: We have an unusually warm autumn, but it's happening right now,

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Speaker 3: so all the leaves are falling and it's kind of

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Speaker 3: rainy and grizzly.

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Speaker 2: Is there any concern about Russia and Ukraine up that way, Carl.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. I mean historically it's always been the case,

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Speaker 3: but the problem now is of course that there's an

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Speaker 3: actual war on European soil. But yeah, I don't worry

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Speaker 3: too much because you know, I've been here for a

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Speaker 3: long time, in almost sixty years, and Russia has always

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Speaker 3: been like, you know, the big bad wolf in a way.

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Speaker 3: But of course there is a difference between threats and

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Speaker 3: actual warfare.

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Speaker 2: So we'll see, keep our figures crossed and say some prayers.

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Speaker 2: Tell us more about your background. How did you get

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Speaker 2: involved in magic in the occult?

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Speaker 3: Well, I think in any healthy teenager there is this

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Speaker 3: interest in whatever your parents don't like, right, and whether

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Speaker 3: it's a weird music or weird art or philosophy. And

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Speaker 3: I think I was no different. I was probably more hungry, though.

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Speaker 3: I was like voracious in terms of you know, finding

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Speaker 3: cool music and finding cool books, and there was still

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Speaker 3: bookstores around, and you know, you come across these people

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Speaker 3: like Alister Crowley, the Golden Dawn, Anton LaVey, of course,

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Speaker 3: you know, and they're you know, controversial in a way,

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Speaker 3: but basically it's a good philosophy of individual will and

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Speaker 3: then you have different experts mental ways of empowering yourself.

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Speaker 3: And I was, early on, you know, quite taken by that,

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Speaker 3: very interested. More so than just trying it out. I

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Speaker 3: realized that this really resonates with me. And then when

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Speaker 3: I got slightly older, you know, my late teens, I

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Speaker 3: started networking, writing letters, having my fanzines and and just

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Speaker 3: seeing who's out there, who's willing to respond, And there

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Speaker 3: was really like, you know, the magical cave opened to

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Speaker 3: me early on, and I've been on that magical path

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Speaker 3: since then.

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Speaker 2: Good for you. Have you had special teachers helping you

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Speaker 2: along the way.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say so. And you know you have

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Speaker 3: to take into consideration that it's not like going to

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Speaker 3: Harry Potter school, you know, Hogwarts sing class. It's more

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Speaker 3: more intuitive. But of course people who have experience, i

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Speaker 3: mean literally experienced from these experimental techniques and you know,

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Speaker 3: working with their own will finding meaning they can teach

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Speaker 3: you in different ways. You know, they may have written

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Speaker 3: books and you can read it and talk about it.

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Speaker 3: But there's also a lot of stuff going on, usually

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Speaker 3: in between the lines, like with you you hang out

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Speaker 3: with someone like I did with Anton LaVey, for instance,

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Speaker 3: and a lot of it is going on in between

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Speaker 3: the lines, like little nudges or recommendations for movies and

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Speaker 3: books and you know, just trying out that resonance that

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Speaker 3: can come up with between two people and a la.

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Speaker 3: LaVey was very good with that in the sense that

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Speaker 3: he could have said, now you do this, and now

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Speaker 3: you do that, but in a way he had already

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Speaker 3: done that through his books, So I think the people

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Speaker 3: he let into his black house at the time, he

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Speaker 3: was more interested in hanging out with them, and I

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Speaker 3: was fortunate to be one of those people. And I

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Speaker 3: did learn a lot, and I did learn a lot

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Speaker 3: of magical stuff from him and from other people. But

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Speaker 3: it's very rarely in this sort of didactic sense, you know,

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Speaker 3: you know, step one, do this, step two, do this.

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Speaker 3: It's much more versatile, much more intuitive, and kind of

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Speaker 3: hard to describe, but it does fill you with energy

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Speaker 3: and empowerment that you can feel definitely comes from those

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Speaker 3: specific directions.

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Speaker 2: I'll get into Anton Levey in just a second with you.

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Speaker 2: Did your parents encourage you to do this?

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Speaker 3: Well, encourage maybe a strong word, but they were kind

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Speaker 3: of weird those too. My father had ran a jazz

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Speaker 3: club in Stockholm that was world famous called the Golden Circle,

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Speaker 3: and like, for instance, my cradle, just when I was born,

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Speaker 3: was bought for me by the jazz musician Ornette Coleman,

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Speaker 3: you know, and at the time, growing up, I thought, oh,

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Speaker 3: that's a weird, awkward whatever, But then I check out

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Speaker 3: whatever he's done, and it's just amazing music. And you

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Speaker 3: know what they say, the hand that rocks the cradle, right,

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Speaker 3: you know, so Ornette Coleman brought me my cradle. I

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Speaker 3: met a lot of weird jazz people. My mother was

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Speaker 3: very much into art, and both of them had been

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Speaker 3: in the States in the late fifties as teenagers, you know,

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Speaker 3: studying or checking out the jazz scene in New York.

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Speaker 3: And I found an old clip from the Village Voice

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Speaker 3: of All magazines in which my mother had been interviewed

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Speaker 3: talking about Crawley, and this made no sense, you know.

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Speaker 3: I found that out much much later on in life

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Speaker 3: when I was an adult. But I do believe that

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Speaker 3: they were special. They were weird, but they never sort

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Speaker 3: of influenced me in that way. They were more like,

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Speaker 3: you know, dreamers in their own right, taking solace with

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Speaker 3: you know, jazz music and art. And I was kind

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Speaker 3: of let alone to explore these things on my own,

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Speaker 3: and therefore I found my own path in a way.

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Speaker 2: How did you come into contact with the English singer

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Speaker 2: Jennie orange Well.

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Speaker 3: Genesis p Orrich was part of many things like performance art,

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Speaker 3: experimental art in the seventies, and then there was this

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Speaker 3: musical experimental project called Throbbing Gristle that I really loved,

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Speaker 3: and then that turned into another band called Psychic TV.

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Speaker 3: And Psychic TV went further than having just a musical

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Speaker 3: experimental band in a way or group. They also had

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Speaker 3: a concrete magical order, meaning an association, a group where

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Speaker 3: people could get together an experiment with ritual magic, occult studies.

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Speaker 3: And it didn't require that you weren't in London. You

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Speaker 3: could do this by newsletters, networking, sending things back and forth.

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Speaker 3: And that really turned me on. It was fantastic because

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Speaker 3: they did something that hadn't really been done before. They

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Speaker 3: had modernized magic, you know, taking it away from the

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Speaker 3: nineteen century romantic notion of you know, Crowley and the

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Speaker 3: Golden Dawn. They were weaving in modern art and creative

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Speaker 3: processes in this kind of magical hat in a way,

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Speaker 3: and I found that very, very stimulating. So I became

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Speaker 3: friends with Genesis and we remained friends up until Agent's

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Speaker 3: death in twenty twenty, and we worked on many things,

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Speaker 3: you know, magical things, but also three made three albums

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Speaker 3: and a couple of books and a documentary film. So

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Speaker 3: it was yeah, lifelong, very important teacher and friend for me.

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Speaker 2: She had a very strange looking teeth too, Carl, did.

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Speaker 3: She Yeah, absolutely all gold. I don't really know why.

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Speaker 3: Maybe the original teeth weren't in that good of shape,

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Speaker 3: or it was part of, you know, an art project

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Speaker 3: or part of the magic. You know, you can never

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Speaker 3: really tell, because people do weird things, especially artists and

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Speaker 3: maybe especially magician artists too. That in a way could

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Speaker 3: be you know, making virtues out of necessities, meaning, oh,

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Speaker 3: I have to fix my teeth, I might as well,

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Speaker 3: you know, turn me into gold, like some kind of alchemy.

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Speaker 3: But Jen was very fanciful, very creative, very much I

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Speaker 3: would say, a magician's magician. And you referred to to

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Speaker 3: Jen as she. That was a later preference from him her.

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Speaker 3: I got to know Jen when Jen was still was

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Speaker 3: still a man in that sense, so I've just stuck

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Speaker 3: with the he and that was fine too. But this

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Speaker 3: kind of malleability is indicative of the kind of magic

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Speaker 3: that I have been taught in, educated in, so that

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Speaker 3: nothing is really fixed. Reality is malleable, and we can

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Speaker 3: do many, many things that are super creative and yeah,

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Speaker 3: kind of mind blowing, transcendent, transcendental if you have that

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Speaker 3: approach rather than looking at life as a causal you know,

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Speaker 3: a here, be there. You go from A to be

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Speaker 3: and you can expect a trajectory, you can expect a result.

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Speaker 3: But if you instead put C in between A and

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Speaker 3: B and you know, make it a little bit topsy turvy,

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Speaker 3: very interesting things can happen.

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Speaker 2: Was Jen more of an a cultist than anything else?

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Speaker 3: I would say that Jen was more of an artist

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Speaker 3: than anything else. But from very early on in Jen's

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Speaker 3: artistic development and also career, magic was always there. Occultism

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Speaker 3: was always there as one technique or one set of

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Speaker 3: techniques that allowed for people to transform themselves. That was

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Speaker 3: very very clearly manifested in the performance art of the

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Speaker 3: nineteen seventies. Was also there in the Throbbing Gristle Project,

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Speaker 3: definitely there in the thematically occult Psychic TV and Temple

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Speaker 3: of Psychic Youth as it was called, and also later

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Speaker 3: on it was basically art. The structure was art, that

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Speaker 3: the idea was art, but it was always imbued with

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Speaker 3: this I would call occult or esoteric or magical transformative

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Speaker 3: energy that affected all of the art.

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Speaker 2: So go back to Anton Levy for a moment. If

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Speaker 2: we can't Carl now, a lot of people considered him

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Speaker 2: to be a Satanist. Did he try to influence you

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Speaker 2: that way?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, But then it was already too late,

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Speaker 3: you know, because I had read his book The Satanic Bible,

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Speaker 3: and you know, another full up book called the Satanic

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Speaker 3: Rituals already in the mid nineteen eighties, so I knew

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Speaker 3: that stuff before we actually met and before we came

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Speaker 3: into contact. So I think I was already I wouldn't

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Speaker 3: say a believer, but I certainly resonated with his take

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Speaker 3: on magic. You know, he called it Satanism based on

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Speaker 3: the stuff that resonated with him. He was very much

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Speaker 3: a contrarian. He liked to oppose the norms of of

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Speaker 3: you know, common culture in a way not for its

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Speaker 3: own sake, but because that made him feel empowered. And

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Speaker 3: of course, the original symbol in our culture, which is

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Speaker 3: basically you know, Judeo Christian is of course, you know,

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Speaker 3: the fallen Angel and Satan. So for him, Satan is

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Speaker 3: a symbol more than anything else, that takes on these

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Speaker 3: qualities of opposing what's inert, of opposing what's not really healthy,

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Speaker 3: of putting the finger on the bare nerve where the

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Speaker 3: nerve has been bared by the fact that maybe the

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Speaker 3: organism isn't working so well. So I think there's always

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Speaker 3: that element. The way I look at it after, you know,

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Speaker 3: having known him and read all of his stuff, it's

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Speaker 3: almost like his kind of Satanism is like an immune

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Speaker 3: defense system. Something pops up and says, hey, there's something

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Speaker 3: wrong here. And of course some energies in the body

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Speaker 3: might not like to hear that because they're happy where

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Speaker 3: they are. But for the totality to be healthy, there

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Speaker 3: needs to be that agent or agency that sort of

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Speaker 3: sounds the alarm in a way. And that's very much

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Speaker 3: how I look at it. So he didn't sit with me,

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Speaker 3: or I didn't sit with him, and he was saying,

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Speaker 3: you know, you have to believe in Satan, and this

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Speaker 3: is Satan ladda da. It was obvious from beginning that

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Speaker 3: it's a symbol and what can be defined according to

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Speaker 3: him and also his organization, the Church of Satan, is

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Speaker 3: basically something that is so uniquely individual to you that

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Speaker 3: becomes the Satanic because it goes usually against what people

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Speaker 3: usually like, is like individual versus collective in a way,

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Speaker 3: and it doesn't need to be a clinch, it doesn't

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Speaker 3: need to be a fight, it doesn't need to be

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Speaker 3: too strong. A contrast, most people that I know who

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Speaker 3: are loving and Satanists, they're just very happy to be

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Speaker 3: on their own, in their own world, build their own

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Speaker 3: perfect little paradise based on things that resonate with them,

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Speaker 3: and that in itself, when you're conscious about that construction

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Speaker 3: of a time and space that you really love, that

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Speaker 3: becomes satanic because it's not something that most people do.

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Speaker 3: Most people are, I would say, unfortunately, too prone to

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Speaker 3: just swallow without chewing, you know, to accept what's being

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Speaker 3: fed to them. And I believe that, Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Sorry, what do you think happened to Anton Labay to

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Speaker 2: make him become a Satanist?

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Speaker 3: I think he found out early on that there was

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Speaker 3: power and being the outsider, you know some people are.

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Speaker 3: He said that Satanists are born, not made. You know

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Speaker 3: what does that mean? Well, I think some people are

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Speaker 3: born and grow up feeling that they're different, and some

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Speaker 3: people become deep rest because of that and say, oh,

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Speaker 3: I can't deal with this, you know, I'm the odd one.

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Speaker 3: Maybe they get bullied, whatever, But there's also a lot

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Speaker 3: of power in being the one outside because then you

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Speaker 3: can look in and see what the other people are

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Speaker 3: doing and find you know, faults with that. And I

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Speaker 3: think that he was an odd kid. He wasn't part

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Speaker 3: of you know, a gang or a crowd. He was

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Speaker 3: a solitary little kid who liked to read science fiction

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Speaker 3: and you know, be in his own world. And I

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Speaker 3: think most what do you call it, like prodigal prodigal

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Speaker 3: kids are like that. They're left to their own devices,

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Speaker 3: they develop on their own terms, and they find things

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Speaker 3: that they resonate with and then you know, you don't

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Speaker 3: have to be or call yourself a Satanist to do that,

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Speaker 3: of course, but he, I think, found being interested in

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Speaker 3: the occult early on, found that there's power in this

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Speaker 3: strong symbol, especially within that culture. The symbol of Satan

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Speaker 3: is still powerful, and I think he found that and

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Speaker 3: he ran with it, and he made a career out

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Speaker 3: of it too.

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Speaker 2: Did he ever talk about God to you?

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Speaker 3: No, not to me, But I have, you know, since

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Speaker 3: I also wrote a book about him and made a

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Speaker 3: documentary film about him much later on, I found some

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Speaker 3: very interesting video interviews from the heyday, you know, from

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Speaker 3: the seventies and stuff, where he someone asks him, you know,

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Speaker 3: what are you anti Christian? And he replied very wisely,

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Speaker 3: I think that he was un Christian, you know, meaning

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Speaker 3: not anti Christian being because basically, according to his Satanic philosophy,

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Speaker 3: people can believe whatever they want to. That's fine as

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Speaker 3: long as you don't try to push it down someone

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Speaker 3: else's throat. Right, So there's tolerance there and you know,

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Speaker 3: keep your distance, you know, mind your own business. That's

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Speaker 3: beautiful qualities. But so for him, he was an Christian

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Speaker 3: in the sense that he did not resonate with the

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Speaker 3: value systems of the Judea, of Christian philosophy or religion.

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Speaker 3: But that didn't mean that he was opposed to anyone

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Speaker 3: being those people as long as they left him alone.

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Speaker 3: But then, of course, what do you do. You know,

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Speaker 3: when you call yourself a Satanist and you write the

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Speaker 3: Satanic Bible and you have satanis the key symbol. Of course,

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Speaker 3: that's like you know, putting your hand in the hornet's nest.

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Speaker 3: In a way, there will be very many angry Christians

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Speaker 3: and other people who find it, you know, despicable, and

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Speaker 3: you know, become aggressive.

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Speaker 1: And la daa.

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Speaker 3: So of course you know that. But the power there

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Speaker 3: lies in the confrontation. The power there lies in the provocation,

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Speaker 3: but I would say he was not against Christianity. He

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Speaker 3: accepted it as what it is. It is the world

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Speaker 3: religion affecting many people, and I'm also affecting many people

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Speaker 3: in a good way. I'd say, I've met, you know,

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Speaker 3: some genuine Christians whose lives are filled with meaning because

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Speaker 3: of their religion. So it's never about going anti, you know,

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Speaker 3: saying this has to stop. Whatever, it's just being un

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Speaker 3: Christian like you can be, you know, root for one

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Speaker 3: team in soccer or American football but not another.

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