[pagan-magik] Re: pagan-magik Digest, Vol 1, Issue 9 intro

[Steve (Dionysian Underground)]

In response to Sean's request for intros I'll post the
notes I've produced for my radio interview tommorrow,
based on the questions sent to me, its probably more
than you need to know, but its all I have time to
produce at the moment. It will probably be rewritten
as a webpage for my section of the DU website
eventually.




Who are you? What motivates you?

I don’t know, I don’t think anyone knows who they
really are. Mystery is important.

Motivations are a difficult one, I basically just
rationally follow my feelings and hope for the best.
But most of all I just follow what pleases me most,
and is fun, as I think that’s what it means to live
naturally and positively.

How do you see yourself? 

I currently see myself as a Cultural Activist.

What is a Cultural Activist?

Its about social change, and its patently obvious that
we need that, its very similar to a political
activist, though much broader, as I think culture is
the root problem not just political or economic
arrangements, though those are also very important and
a part of culture. It includes every aspect of culture
from practical social issues through spirituality to
pure creative art, and all points in between. Its also
as much about psychological and perceptual change as
it is social transformation (though the two cannot
really be separated). And of course by culture I
principally mean ‘counterculture, as I’m not
interested in very much within our existing culture.

What do you do?

Mostly I’m a writer and a philosopher at the moment,
though when I can I help organise events, and
facilitate groups like the London Anarchist Forum,
London's only free debating platform for libertarian
socialists, and the Anarchist Study Project, a
collective which aims to modernize anarchist and post
situationist theory, as well as initiate a few
projects of my own. I’d like to do lots more, though
like most people my time and resources are limited at
the moment.


How would you define Counterculture?

Its any subculture within a society, which on the
whole sees itself as opposed to the culture its part
of, and tries to radically change it, or at least opt
out from it. Its also everything excluded from
mainstream society. An outsider culture.
I give a brief history of it on the website, dating
its modern form from 1923 till today, but in one form
or another an underground alternative culture has
always existed. It’s the factor that changes existing
society, everything else just reinforces it. Including
alas the working class (and here I now differ sharply
from many other anarchists, though by no means all).

How can you change a Society you are part of but
‘disconnected’ from?

Its difficult, that’s why society tends to be
conservative, but its also a complex system and quite
unstable. At the moment there’s an equilibrium between
the sociocultural order and the psychological order, a
wheel we are trapped on, but that could change at
anytime, as there are so many variables involved. But
basically the key is to live the change you want to
see, This is actually becoming more possible the more
desperate and powerless people feel in a self
destructing civilisation, the more psychologically
charged they become, and the more they want to try to
opt out and explore alternative possibilities.
Possibilities the existing system usually suppresses.

Why do you want to change Society?

Because we live in one of the most oppressive
civilisations the world has ever known, which not only
immiserates the lives of many of its victims, but
fosters alienation of all kinds. Alienation between
people, alienation within people, and most pressing
today, alienation from nature, and even from life
itself. All of which of course are interrelated. 
Modern civilisation is like a vast machine that
disempowers people and uses them as cogs in a
mechanism rather than allowing them to be creative
beings. This is a source of great misery for those
awake enough to be aware of it.
Such a negative system also blocks, or rather steals,
people’s creative power, power that should be
furthering their self realisation as individuals and
creating their shared life world, but instead only
enriches the privileged few who created the machine (a
few who fortunately become fewer every day, the
ultimate contradiction destined to destroy the system
in my view).

It might sound strange to describe our society as the
most oppressive, in the light of Saddam Hussein, the
Taliban, Leninism and Nazi Germany, but 
while these were certainly more murderous than our
society, which merely preserves misery and slowly
poisons, they were largely mere psychotic reactions to
the greater oppressive system of Capitalist Liberal
Democracy. 

A system all the more oppressive in its pretence of
empty freedoms, as opposed to the more blatant
totalitarianism of its failed enemies. A system in
which even if almost the entire population took to the
streets, in opposition to the War in Iraq, or
Globalisation, would merely shrug it off as proof of
our democratic system and carry on regardless,
allegedly in furtherance of that
system. That’s how sick our civilisation has become. 

However my motive isn’t some idealistic mission to
transform society, I’m very suspicious of moral
crusaders who want to do that. It smacks not only of a
huge ego, but of a somewhat authoritarian personality.
As has been clearly demonstrated in many historical
oppositions. I’m more motivated by my own experiences
in life, and a personal desire to be free and
empowered, just the same as anyone else is, it’s just
that my desires haven’t been diverted into the
capitalist illusion of freedom and empowerment to the
same extent as others, nor am I crushed into
expediently accepting existing society as an
inevitable fate like many others. 

But most motivating of all is my awareness of the
suffering of others who are even more the victims of
society than I am, though even here I’d maintain this
was a selfish motivation based on my relationships
with others rather than some worthy altruism!
Basically I became aware that my personal well being,
and that of my friends and lovers, was dependent on me
being part of a movement for social change, rather
than any moral self righteousness or pretentious
altruism. 

Most  of all though I want to be part of the
transformation just for the sheer fun and empowerment
of it. That’s the real key.

What projects are you currently working on?

The longest term project I’m still involved with is
the Dionysian Underground, a conscious attempt at
working with Dionysian culture. A group that is
essentially a collective, but for which I’ve become
one of its most active promoters and theorists, and so
often confused as its founder, or even leader.

But more recently with a network called the Pagan
Magical Activists, an alliance currently including
radical individuals and groups like the Dionysian
Underground, The Dragon Network, the Reclaimers, the
Invisible Illuminati and the Serpent Institute, which
emerged from the recent European Social Forum weekend,
and uses magic and pagan rites both practically and as
a form of agit prop. Its long term intention being to
unite all such activists into a loose network. 

What events have you been involved with?

I’ve been peripherally involved with most of the
Mayday and European Social Forum anti Capitalist
events over the years. But the last big event I was
involved in was one you might remember yourself, the
24 hour William Blake poetry event this time last
year. Which has become almost legendary in some
quarters now.

More recently I’ve been involved with setting up Wyrd
Walks, a series of Psychogeographic tours of London,
which is a mixture of cultural activism, enlightened
education and bread and butter work.  

I started out helping Fraser Clark, the guy who
started Megatripolis and the Warp, with some of his
projects, primarily at the Den of Enlightenment. I
still contribute to his ezine the UP! Occasionally.
And have been helping coordinate the annual Zippy
picnic for the past few years (a very easy job
as nothing usually happens there)!

Would you call your self a Zippy?

No, I’m a Dionysian anarchist, but a Zippy fellow
traveller. 


What’s Dionysian mean?

That’s a very difficult question to answer as it is a
concept that has evolved organically, and still is,
rather than something just invented.

The Dionysian Underground began with the formation of
a shared mindset amongst an affinity group of half a
dozen members of the Anarchist Study Project, who
continued to meet socially in the late 90’s. It
embodied a set of cultural and political ideas and
bohemian inclinations we discovered we had ‘uniquely’
in common, ranging from anarchistic surrealism through
atheistic occultism to free sex and drug culture, and
originally called by a variety of names ranging from
Promethean Hedonism to Ecstatic Nihilism, though none
of which were felt to be satisfactory.  

Over time we realised we weren’t so unique in our
mindset, as more and more people identified with it,
and began to regard it as representing a specific
underground cultural substream. A substream present in
counterculture in the form of the more radical
manifestations of the Rave scene, as it had earlier
been in other phenomena such as Punk, and elements of
sixties Psychedelia, as well as in the more
revolutionary forms of anarchism and Situationism, and
their antecedents. It also had close affinities with
the ideas of Hakim Bey and Discordianism, though we
found both of these forms somewhat immature
manifestations, and decided to develop our own ideas. 

While often a gut reactive antirational culture, what
we identified also had a  deeper philosophical side,
that seemed to be rooted in the ideas of the ancient
Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who believed that
everything was in a state of flux and cyclic change,
and that oppositional duality was a necessary but
illusory conceptualisation drawn from a paradoxical,
holistic reality beyond appearance. Basically that
everything was part of one dynamic process, especially
things that seemed opposites. A kind of Ancient Greek
Taoism, as well as a philosophy that prefigured, and
probably influenced, many of William Blake’s ideas on
free dynamic living and the contraries. A reality
contacted more through instinct , intuition and
imagination rather than reason.

But when we realised that Heraclitus had been the
source of philosophers as diverse as Hegel and
Nietzsche, who in turn had spawned modern socialism,
anarchism, existentialism, psychoanalysis and
postmodernism (for good and ill), we realised that
this was more than a substream it was the roots of
radical culture in the West, with its parallels in the
East within Taoism and Shivaism.

Then in a number of synchronicities the name Dionysian
emerged, we learned that Heraclitus had probably been
an inititiate of the pagan mysteries of Dionysos, as
had been Sparticus, the rebel slave who effectively
led the first revolutionary movement and the earliest
free spirit Gnostics. Nietzsche and those moderns
influenced by him had also latched on to this and
called their ethos Dionysian. Further more we learnt
that Jack Kerouac, founder of the Beat movement, had
in a TV interview defined the common thread between
the Beats and the Hippy movement to be a Dionysian
culture, as had other influences on us, and him, Allen
Ginsberg and William Burroughs. It seemed the name
Dionysian had found us rather than us finding it, the
term Underground followed on naturally, following our
brief incarnation as the Dionysian Circus!

On educating ourselves on the nature of the original
archetype of all this, Dionysos, we discovered that
far from the mere god of wine and intoxication
represented by the Classicists, he was actually the
centre of a profound mystery cult, and in effect the
Greek version of Shiva, the antithesis of all imposed
order in the world and transcendental delusions beyond
it. The principle of life, death and rebirth and the
dynamism of nature. In a western context Dionysos is
also a hybrid of Pan and the Goddess archetype, an
androgene beyond gender concepts. I think these are to
be understood in terms of anthropomorphicised aspects
of nature and human consciousness rather than deities
in the archaic sense.  
  
Our final conclusion was that the Dionysian stream
represented the purest form of radical culture and
underground revolt, and its polymorphous, dynamic
essence had been imperfectly manifested in a variety
of forms throughout history (including one of its
current, but probably equally imperfect, forms known
as the Dionysian Underground). We thus started a
project to spread this idea and support manifestations
of Dionysian culture wherever we found them. The
Dionysian Underground being essentially a mutual aid
network for those involved in such projects.  
 


So are you a Pagan and do you really practise Magick?
I’ve been fascinated with these subjects most of my
life. But more practically
I think Spirituality is one of those important aspects
of life excluded from our overly materialistic
society. Though all I mean by spirituality is that
which we experience intuitively and aesthetically as
being beyond the limitations of rational materialism.
I also believe, on a scientific basis, that neither
our current concepts of matter and space-time, nor our
ideas or perceptions, are the basis of reality, so I’m
neither a classical scientific materialist nor a
trippy ontological idealist, but rather believe that
something more mysterious and paradoxical, beyond our
normal conception, is the ultimate reality, of which
both consciousness and physicality are our limited
conceptualisations of aspects of one reality, aspects
that mutually interact. A universe based on a concrete
panpsychism in short. But that said I’m a total
atheist, even if my concept of individual potential
may border on the theological! For instance, I suspect
that individual consciousness is the product of the
conscious potential of the entire universe, and that
we all have varying degrees of psychic ability because
of this. Thus magick of some kind becomes a
possibility.  As for paganism, I think some forms of
paganism are the most aesthetic cultural grounding for
a libertarian and nature connected spirituality, so I
quite enjoy it as an ethos, though I’m far too
irreligious to see it as anything more than this. For
me pagan rites and magical practises are artistic
pursuits that reenchant life, they are not to
dissimilar to other surrealistic or psychogeographic
activities I’ve taken part in. They are good grounds
for agit prop (consciousness raising through street
theatre and other activity), and if they work (as they
sometimes appear to) then so much the better. My
attitude here is more of a suspension of belief, or
even disbelief, in conventional narratives, opening a
space for new ontological possibilities, rather than a
faith in magick or paganism or any religion in of
themselves.   

How do you define Anarchism?

Anarchism is the politics of freedom, it simply means
the rejection of ‘domination culture’ and all ‘power
over’, and the abolition of all government, 
the rule of law and all forms of hierarchy. All of
which fail simply because power corrupts, as we are
all basically selfish, while in contrast generalised
impersonal rules merely disempower and can’t be
applied fairly to particular situations. Moreover, as
the Discordians said in the 60’s,  ‘imposition of
order equals escalation of chaos’, and anarchists
basically want a more natural and ordered, free
society. Anarchism promotes localised, egalitarian
communities, associations and institutions, organised
voluntarily and democratically, and always on a
consensus basis. It also implies a social economy of
some kind, rather than a competitive market economy,
as inequality of wealth is obviously more of a
negative limitation on most people’s freedom than it
is an empowerment for a minority. And Liberal
Capitalism always requires a background of inequality
to operate in.

There are many different ideas of what this vague
outline would be like in reality, and how it would
function in practise, as well as a variety of
political and economic theories compatible with these
visions, but the details aren’t usually elaborated
further in public, as anarchists believe it is for
communities to decide how they organise themselves and
not for ideologues to tell people how to live. Even
publishing some general ‘anarchist’ blueprint can have
the effect of suppressing local solutions and
imaginative alternatives. 

The grounding of such a society would be self
regulation and community. Something rare in modern
society, but then human nature being shaped largely by
social factors, a benign society creates benign
people, as opposed to a dysfunctional society like
ours which creates dysfunctional people. This also
ties in with ecological ideas, as our current
environmental problems derive from our cultural
dysfunction. In such a society free of impoverishment
a tiny minority of congenital sociopaths could be
easily managed.

In practise I think an anarchist post capitalist world
would consist of a decentralised patchwork of
communities organised in a variety of ways (both
traditional and experimental and not all anarchist by
any means), within a confederation that insures mutual
defence, exchange and freedom of movement between
communities. Eutopians like myself believe that purely
anarchist communities will be successful and
eventually become universal, as they are the only
communities that allow total individual freedom,
combined with universal access to resources, and so
allowing full self actualisation.  

This change is mostly evolutionary, and occurs both
outwardly socially and  inwardly psychologically, but
accelerated periods of evolution, after generations of
statis and suppression, may occasionally involve what
some people call revolutions.  

Anarchism only tends to be an aggressive current in
its present form as its constituency consists of an
enlightened minority within a shrinking but still
largely impoverished and brainwashed mass, and so its
survival has historically often depended on its
assertive ability. Of course there are many barbarians
who call themselves anarchists but aren’t.  But even
they may have their role in the effort to overturn
established society.

What do you think of David Icke?

I’m not sure, on the one hand he seems well
intentioned in exposing the conspiratorial elements of
the system, and does so in a very entertaining and
often hilarious way, though on the other hand he also
seems completely nuts. But in general I think he’s
quite dangerous, as while some people see him as a
champion against the system, in reality he’s very much
a fantasist, and totally gullible. A group of people I
know of, who shall be nameless, made a project out of
feeding him false information, which generally turned
up as hard fact in his books months later. If they can
do that anyone can. I’m not saying its all bullshit,
elements of his theories come from genuine
parapolitical research, just that he’s indiscriminate
with his data, and what he weaves it into sometimes
sounds reminiscent of Nazi propaganda, especially as
its often targeted against Jewish and liberal elitist
elements of the Establishment, who are more likely to
support the Democrats, rather than the far right,
neo-conservatives, who now control the Whitehouse. But
at the same time it also serves the ruling class he
allegedly opposes, by making them seem unified and all
powerful, and so undefeatable, instead of
factionalised and weak as they really are. In many
ways it serves the martyr complex on the left, those
who prefer to be heroic victims rather than effective
revolutionaries. In that respect he may be the CIA’s
greatest asset. But his ultimate political effect is
complex and will only be really assessable in
retrospect I suspect.

Do you believe in Conspiracy Theory?

I think Conspiracy Theory is part of the conspiracy, a
method of psychological warfare and disinformation
designed to disempower people. The world isn’t
as simple as conspiracy theorists would have us
believe, this simplicity is part of its attraction of
course. There are two opposing ways commonly used to
explain the political world, Conspiracy Theory and
Contingency Theory, the idea that everything is
unpredictable and accidental. But as with all dualisms
both poles are too extreme and over simplistic, the
truth is in the complex web of relations between these
two extremes, the area some call parapolitics. Here we
have the far more realistic picture of various rival
groups of wannabe conspirators, operating on a
reactive basis, in an unpredictable world largely
beyond their control. Of course sometimes a few
factions can form pragmatic alliances, and pull off
temporary successes, like rigging the US elections or
invention of the War Against Terror, or just inventing
more disempowering conspiracies, but these successes
are only ever transitory. Basically politics as usual,
just more secretive and illegal.



How did you get to where you are now, did you plan it?

Not at all. I’ve never planned anything, I just deduce
what wants to happen and help it happen. Initially I
was just a rebel for the sake of it, even a rebel
against conventional rebellion. It was only later as a
punk in the late 70’s that I eventually became aware
of anarchism and situationist ideas. The pagan side of
things was originally separate, but probably similarly
motivated, and merged in later when I found a similar
combination of ideas amongst friends. 
I just drifted into it. Today I see the world as a
self organising system, of which we are a part. Trying
to assert will over this just creates chaos, while
being totally passive before it makes us a victim, as
it isn’t necessarily a benign influence. Life is just
a wave that needs to be surfed, to use an old
metaphor.
It’s a Taoist notion if you like, a stance I apply
both to my own psychology as well as events in life.



=====
Every Man and Every Woman Is A Star


		
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