Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George
Speaker 1: Nori with you. Karl Abrahamson is a writer, publisher, magic anthropologist,
Speaker 1: filmmaker and photographer. Since the mid nineteen eighties, he's been
Speaker 1: active in the international magical community, integrating what we call
Speaker 1: a culture as a way of life and luxurying about
Speaker 1: his findings and speculations. The author of Source Magic, A
Speaker 1: Culture Residences, and Anton Levy in the Church of Satan,
Speaker 1: as well as editor and publisher of the annual anthology
Speaker 1: of a Culture, The Fenris Wolf. Carl, welcome back to
Speaker 1: the program. Have you been sir? Thank you very much
Speaker 1: for having me. It's great to be here, and I've
Speaker 1: been good. I've been a diligent little boy writing away
Speaker 1: writing new books. Excellent. Good for you. You You do a
Speaker 1: great job writing. How'd you get started in all this?
Speaker 1: I think it was already back in school. You know,
Speaker 1: you get these early senses of vocation, and I found
Speaker 1: that my vocation was in writing. And then, of course
Speaker 1: what should you write about? Well, that's the game of life.
Speaker 1: You accumulate experience and you find interesting things. You go
Speaker 1: to interesting places and you start connecting dogs and suddenly
Speaker 1: you have your own mind frame, you know. And I
Speaker 1: was very early on interested in magic and sort of
Speaker 1: the supernatural and fantasy and myths and all these things.
Speaker 1: And I've just rolled with it basically, and today I
Speaker 1: write about it from these sort of down to earth perspectives.
Speaker 1: It's not highbrow and it's not, you know, too symbolic
Speaker 1: or too artcane. It just tried to see what's magical
Speaker 1: today in a way. And then I write about that.
Speaker 1: Some people kind of spell magic ending in a K.
Speaker 1: You have an mgic as we haven't here in the
Speaker 1: United States yet, is there really a difference? The difference
Speaker 1: is having to do with this probably most famous or
Speaker 1: infamous magician of the twentieth century, a British guy called
Speaker 1: Alister Crowley, and he spelled his magic word with a
Speaker 1: K to sort of differentiate it from the older systems
Speaker 1: that he had been taught in, you know, as kids
Speaker 1: do in a way, you know what you're want to
Speaker 1: set yourself aside from whatever has been before. And some
Speaker 1: people have taken that to heart and spell it like that.
Speaker 1: I prefer the normal spelling in a way because it's
Speaker 1: more inclusive. And what is your thoughts on a culture?
Speaker 1: Occult ure? Yeah, it's it's of course, it's the title
Speaker 1: of a book I've written. But the thing is, it's
Speaker 1: it's more than a penny joining of two words meaning
Speaker 1: occult and culture. It has to do with many things
Speaker 1: that are going on today. I argue that it's tied
Speaker 1: in with our you know, survival instinct because we're facing
Speaker 1: so many difficult problems as a species. We have to
Speaker 1: deal with it somehow, and one of these things is
Speaker 1: going back in time. But also, you know, looking at
Speaker 1: whatever's going on today and historically indigenous tribes different ways
Speaker 1: of dealing with problems. All these things have usually been occult.
Speaker 1: They have been in the occult sphere, hidden, ostracized, perhaps
Speaker 1: even forbidden. But essentially most of these things are just
Speaker 1: like proto science, you know, proto psychology, things that have
Speaker 1: not been validated yet in terms of speculative ideas and
Speaker 1: methods and stuff like that. And I believe that it's
Speaker 1: high time that we carry on taking a look at
Speaker 1: all these sort of band and weird things to see
Speaker 1: if there's some of them gam in there, some little
Speaker 1: seed that can take us into a healthier worldview and
Speaker 1: a more constructive approach. That is basically what a culture is.
Speaker 1: You know, when something goes from the occults to hidden underground,
Speaker 1: into the overground into the mainstream. And that's happening a
Speaker 1: lot today in culture. So we were experiencing pretty strong
Speaker 1: or culture and I think that's very very healthy. A
Speaker 1: lot of people, Carl, when they think about magic, think
Speaker 1: about people like Merlin the magician. You don't necessarily have
Speaker 1: to be a magician to perform magic, do you. No.
Speaker 1: There are many, you know, ways you can define it,
Speaker 1: and I think that one very good and useful description.
Speaker 1: It's just that you know, if you have a will,
Speaker 1: you know you want something, whether it's something you know, worldly,
Speaker 1: like a promotion at work or a new partner, or
Speaker 1: you know, just something in your life that would feel
Speaker 1: it more meaning whatever you do, whatever you do to
Speaker 1: reach that goal. If by definition magical, but then of
Speaker 1: course you have the more you know, cosmic star dust
Speaker 1: sprinkled fairy tales and myths, and you mentioned Merlin, and
Speaker 1: we have the you know, the Harry Potters and all
Speaker 1: of that sort of the mythical stuff that's part of
Speaker 1: it too, because it's it's more integrated in our life
Speaker 1: and our culture and our history than many of us
Speaker 1: care to admit. I admit it freely, and I think
Speaker 1: it's essential that we validated both aspects, both this sort
Speaker 1: of causal process of getting what you want, but also
Speaker 1: acknowledging that there are let's call it supernatural or at
Speaker 1: least sort of super super rational processes that we can't
Speaker 1: explain at this moment, but nonetheless they are true and
Speaker 1: they fill our lives with meaning. Let's talk about your
Speaker 1: title of your latest book, Source Magic The Origin of Art,
Speaker 1: Science and Culture. Explain what that is. It's basically, you know,
Speaker 1: the book is an anthology that contains essays and lectures
Speaker 1: about many things. But it dawned on me along the way,
Speaker 1: when are you know, lecturing and writing that, Well, all
Speaker 1: of this makes sense together, and there is something we
Speaker 1: do have a source. We cannot go back to prehistoric
Speaker 1: times when there are no documentation, not even you know,
Speaker 1: cave paintings, but we can based on the data that
Speaker 1: we have from archaeology, and just remains that. Of course,
Speaker 1: life was incredibly tough back then, so you had to
Speaker 1: stay together, help each other work it out, pretend yourself
Speaker 1: and your friends and tribes from many, many threats, and
Speaker 1: part of this was getting information from what you can
Speaker 1: call a shamanic mind set, mind frame, basically going traveling
Speaker 1: inside to get information not from necessarily external God's external forces,
Speaker 1: but rather psychological insights that certain people with a capacity
Speaker 1: for that kind of free floating meditation in a way
Speaker 1: have and then they bring it back to the tribe
Speaker 1: and they can be useful. And everything that we have
Speaker 1: in our culture today have sort of discernable trails going
Speaker 1: back to that original shamanic mind frame. Whether it's the
Speaker 1: natural sciences, whether it's culture, whether it's you know, anything human.
Speaker 1: Any human endeavor has that sense of magic to it
Speaker 1: because it deals with speculative questions inside us, should I
Speaker 1: do this? What if? Discorrect? Constant processing not only on
Speaker 1: rational levels but also on irrational levels, and those are
Speaker 1: the seed that can bloom into bigger endeavors. Carl, does
Speaker 1: the magic you talk about include candles and rituals and
Speaker 1: spells and things like that. It can, I would argue
Speaker 1: that it's not really necessary because what I just talked
Speaker 1: about before, there's also this sort of causal magic going
Speaker 1: from point A to point B. Because it's my will
Speaker 1: that can be fulfilling enough and may not require any
Speaker 1: paraphernalia or any adherence to any sort of school or
Speaker 1: teaching or mystical system. But it also can be useful
Speaker 1: as gimmicks in a way to change your mind frame
Speaker 1: in a moment of in a way, you know, programming
Speaker 1: yourself to become more efficient, programming yourself to become more
Speaker 1: susceptible to influx. That could be good for you. And
Speaker 1: all of these things that are in the traditional systems,
Speaker 1: like you know, wands and cups and candles and stuff,
Speaker 1: it could be good mood changers, just like music can
Speaker 1: be that you set yourself in a different mind frame
Speaker 1: in order to experience the moment in a different way
Speaker 1: than if you're just watching TV or playing a game
Speaker 1: or whatever it is. You know, sometimes we can change
Speaker 1: our inner world by changing the outer parameters, and it's
Speaker 1: true the other way around also, u And in doing
Speaker 1: that we can become more efficient in dealing with whatever
Speaker 1: it is that we want to achieve. When we deal
Speaker 1: with magic, are we tapping into sources? What creates the magic? Oh?
Speaker 1: What a good question. I think that there's a general
Speaker 1: dilemma or dichotomy, you know, basically having to do with
Speaker 1: external forces or internal forces. When I was younger, very
Speaker 1: immersed in the mythology of magic, I would say that, oh,
Speaker 1: there are this this angel, or this is a four
Speaker 1: or whatever natural force helped me. But as things have
Speaker 1: progressed and I've grown more mature in a way, I
Speaker 1: believe more and more in the psychology. There's great power
Speaker 1: in the human mind. As they said in the sixties,
Speaker 1: you know, it's all in the mind, and I do
Speaker 1: believe that. I do believe that whatever we've find in
Speaker 1: the inner that can help us bring things out to
Speaker 1: make our lives more meaningful, it's all inside us. It's
Speaker 1: psychological processes, emotional processes, and we have to learn and
Speaker 1: accept actually how easy it is to go inside and
Speaker 1: you know, have a conversation with yourself self basically and
Speaker 1: find new things that are not there. If you're a
Speaker 1: kind of a slave to rational thinking, if you discard
Speaker 1: immediately like emotional stuff, or if we discard intuitive directions.
Speaker 1: It's about being open minded basically. Now, you wrote a
Speaker 1: book a year ago called Anton LaVey in the Church
Speaker 1: of Satan. He kind of performed dark magic, didn't he well,
Speaker 1: I would say, in the sense that a lot of
Speaker 1: it was for selfish purposes. He didn't believe in the fluff.
Speaker 1: He believed that the greatest altruism was being good to
Speaker 1: yourself first, then you can be good to others. And
Speaker 1: there's a big difference there in sort of instead of
Speaker 1: discarding yourself whatever you want for the sake of others,
Speaker 1: it can't be nice and you know, altruistic, but you
Speaker 1: will feel better if you put yourself first, then you
Speaker 1: can help other people. That's one aspect that some people
Speaker 1: may find dark. Then, of course he had the symbol
Speaker 1: of Satan. He didn't believe in any sort of real
Speaker 1: human like Satan figure, but it was a symbol that
Speaker 1: appealed to him because he wanted to stir, you know,
Speaker 1: general American mind frame of the nineteen sixties by having
Speaker 1: this controversial symbol, and it helped him to achieve his goals. So,
Speaker 1: in that sense dark, but he was certainly not like
Speaker 1: a generally like evil person. He was a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: and he was a very you know, funny, intelligent, generous man.
Speaker 1: And if you look at his writings, it's basically taking
Speaker 1: all of the old magic to a new level. He's
Speaker 1: bringing it into our contemporary times and the mind frames
Speaker 1: and he you know, it's part of what I would
Speaker 1: call the source magic, acknowledging that a lot of it
Speaker 1: is psychology. But psychology on an individual level can be
Speaker 1: helped by having these external I'm not going to say trappings,
Speaker 1: but these external gimmicks and gadgets and things that will
Speaker 1: change your mind frame in the moment of ritual. It's
Speaker 1: not dark. It's just applied psychology with some added bonuses
Speaker 1: of changing the atmosphere in the space where you're doing this,
Speaker 1: and it works. People have been doing in humans have
Speaker 1: been doing this for since the dawn of time. Basically,
Speaker 1: would you say Lay was evil? No, I would not.
Speaker 1: You know, to be evil, you have to be unbalanced,
Speaker 1: you have to have, you know, bear a ground judge
Speaker 1: that becomes obsessive and takes over any constructive dealings in life,
Speaker 1: and you know, destroys your own happiness. And he certainly
Speaker 1: works in bad. He was self indulgent, immersing himself in
Speaker 1: his own pleasures. It's a very pleasure oriented philosophy that
Speaker 1: he constructed, and then he had these sort of dark symbols.
Speaker 1: But it's mainly again because he felt attracted to it,
Speaker 1: and then other people have felt attracted to them also.
Speaker 1: But there's nothing inherently evil in that. Evil is imbalanced.
Speaker 1: Evil is when you go against yourself. That's the ultimate evil. Carl.
Speaker 1: What is a magical anthropology. It's something that I came
Speaker 1: up with, and I'm sure others have done it also,
Speaker 1: but I've really become obsessed with the term and the phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Magical anthropology is the study of how humans in all times, spaces,
Speaker 1: cultures have related to the phenomenon magic, both on inner
Speaker 1: levels and also on outer cultural levels. You know, to
Speaker 1: what extent does one culture, for instance, permits ritual and
Speaker 1: magic to be out in the open. I mean, we
Speaker 1: know some societies have banned it, like medieval times, yet
Speaker 1: at the same time, what the magicians were dealing with
Speaker 1: that time is now our science. So it's almost like
Speaker 1: magic is ahead of the curve, and magical anthropology looks
Speaker 1: at that and tries to figure out, you know, if
Speaker 1: their correlation between a good, open like liberal society and
Speaker 1: the presence of magic, and of course individual strong, powerful
Speaker 1: magicians who have left cultural traces. Again, in medieval times,
Speaker 1: there were many of those who became I don't know scapegoats.
Speaker 1: They became victims of their own conviction that this is
Speaker 1: the right path to go. So magic anthropology is basically
Speaker 1: the study of the human beings on individual levels and
Speaker 1: on cultural levels, relationship too. Magic as a phenomenon. How
Speaker 1: many people who practice magic? Carl got the question as
Speaker 1: being witches, for example, by mistake, right, Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: that's it's incredibly I would if I have that hat on,
Speaker 1: so to speak, I would argue that everyone is performing magic.
Speaker 1: That's part of my realization or my deduction in a way,
Speaker 1: that we are so connected to magic and magical thinking
Speaker 1: that everyone does it. But if you mean flamboyantly acting
Speaker 1: with the paraphernalia and dressing up in a different way
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, I would again say, it's not
Speaker 1: the majority, but there's certainly more people doing that than
Speaker 1: the critics would care to admit. And I would say
Speaker 1: one part of your culture has been, for instance, the
Speaker 1: integration of fraternal societies like Freemasons, for instance. It's you know,
Speaker 1: very very widespread, became integrated in culture in the Western
Speaker 1: world and also in other places, and there you have
Speaker 1: all of these things, ritual initiations, dressing up in a
Speaker 1: different way receiving material to study, etc. Etc. That is
Speaker 1: no longer hocus focus. It's part of whatever it is
Speaker 1: that we want to achieve and how we want to
Speaker 1: achieve it. The same thing with yoga. Yoga used to
Speaker 1: be hocus focused in the nineteen sixties. If you were
Speaker 1: the details and you could afford it, you could go
Speaker 1: to an ashram in India and it was sort of
Speaker 1: hokey and hocus pocus. Today, however, almost every housewife you
Speaker 1: know goes to yoga or does yoga at home every day.
Speaker 1: It has been, you know, gone from the account into
Speaker 1: view culture and also into the mainstream. That's just how
Speaker 1: it works. It's like seed. Seed grow underground, but you know,
Speaker 1: we'll write nutrition it will grow upwards towards the sun
Speaker 1: above ground and bloom into a beautiful plant of flower.
Speaker 1: Can magic be used in all kinds of ways, good
Speaker 1: and evil? I would say so. I would say so.
Speaker 1: And for instance, an evil application would be dogma, you know,
Speaker 1: dogmatic propaganda trying to make people go against their own will,
Speaker 1: just like violence is that in its most crude form.
Speaker 1: It could also be done with propaganda presenting a narrative
Speaker 1: that you feel as an individual human if immoral is
Speaker 1: not right. And yet the force of the critical mass
Speaker 1: point safety in numbers, etc. That has been pushed upon
Speaker 1: a mass of people is evil, I would say, because
Speaker 1: it destroys the natural balance, It destroys the natural stratification
Speaker 1: of the individual making individual choices in life. Whatever goes
Speaker 1: against that kind of freedom, to me is inherent evil.
Speaker 1: Have you ever seen anybody you practice magic and they
Speaker 1: were just so phenomenal at it? Strange things happened. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I have. But then you have to to sort of
Speaker 1: take it to Can this, you know, be verified by
Speaker 1: objective means or in an empirical clinical thing. I think
Speaker 1: in some ways it can. I mean, there's been very
Speaker 1: interesting experiments since a couple of decades, you know, doing
Speaker 1: you know, measuring electricity in the brain during meditation for instance,
Speaker 1: and doing agitated things that we call ecstasy, you know,
Speaker 1: whether it's like a sexual sense or it's just exhaustion.
Speaker 1: Basically measuring these rare mental states, these mind frame states,
Speaker 1: mind state frames, and seeing what is the what are
Speaker 1: the physical things going on here? So that's a very
Speaker 1: healthy thing. Also, however, if you see and say that someone, oh,
Speaker 1: that that person was so magical. That movie was so magic,
Speaker 1: or this magician did this and it was incredible magical.
Speaker 1: It sort of sticks in a very subjective interpretation point
Speaker 1: of view that it can be hard to validate. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, not everything needs to be validated,
Speaker 1: because if that experience and that magician was magical to you,
Speaker 1: then so be it. If that fills your life and
Speaker 1: experience with meaning, it's perfect. You know, everything doesn't need
Speaker 1: to be clinically diffected in order to make sense. Listen
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